Westover Soup
4 potatoes 1 quart milk 1 onion 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains paprika 3 tablespoons tomato catsup 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Cook the potatoes in boiling, salted water half an hour, and rub through a strainer. Scald the milk with the onion, remove the onion, and add milk slowly to potatoes. Melt the butter, add dry ingredients, stir until well mixed, then stir into boiling soup; cook twenty minutes, strain, add tomato catsup, and sprinkle with parsley.
A potato-and-milk purée thickened with a butter-flour roux and finished with catsup — essentially a mild potato bisque. The only real pitfall is scorching the milk.
- Scalding the milk"Scald" means heating to just below the boil, until bubbles ring the edge of the pan, around 180F. Use a heavy pan and low heat, or scald it in a bowl set over simmering water; milk left over direct heat will catch on the bottom and taint the whole quart.
- The onionHalve or quarter it so it flavours the milk while it scalds, then lift it out. This is a flavour infusion, not an ingredient — the soup should taste of potato with onion behind it.
- PotatoesFour medium potatoes is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. Floury varieties (russet, Maris Piper) rub through a strainer easily and give a smoother body than waxy ones. Half an hour is right for whole potatoes; cut in chunks they will be done in 15 to 20 minutes.
- "Add dry ingredients"That means the flour, salt, celery salt, pepper and paprika, stirred into the melted butter to make a seasoned roux. Cook it a minute before it goes into the hot soup, and add it gradually while whisking so it does not lump.
- The second cookingTwenty minutes is longer than a roux needs, but it does cook out any raw flour taste. Keep the heat low and stir the bottom often — a starchy dairy soup at a rolling boil will scorch and may curdle.
- Straining twiceThe recipe strains the potato before the milk goes in and again at the end. If you use a blender or food mill for the first pass, the final straining is optional; push it through a sieve only if you want it silky.
- The catsupAdded after the soup is cooked and strained, so it stays bright and slightly sharp. Many catsups of the period were thinner, more vinegared and less sweet than the modern bottle — you may want to start with two tablespoons of today's ketchup and taste before adding the third.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups, serving four to six as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it stands; thin with a little more scalded milk when reheating.
Cream-of-potato soups like this were a familiar part of American "meatless" cookery in the early twentieth century, when meatless meant Lenten fasting or wartime thrift rather than vegetarianism as a conviction — and when milk, butter and flour did the work that stock would otherwise have done. The catsup is the period signature: bottled tomato catsup was cheap and widely available by the 1910s, and household cookbooks used it much as later cooks used tomato paste, to add acid and colour to a pale soup in one spoonful. The name appears decorative rather than descriptive; American cookbooks of the era are often said to have attached place names and house names to otherwise plain dishes, and Westover is a well-known James River plantation in Virginia. There is no evidence linking the recipe itself to that house.