White Soup
1 pound potatoes 2 leeks or 1/4 pound Spanish onions 2 sticks of celery 1 1/2 pints boiling water Salt and pepper 1 pint milk 1/2 ounce flour 1/2 gill cooked green peas 3/4 ounce butter Cut the vegetables into small pieces, and cook in the butter for five minutes. Add to water, bring to boiling point, skim, and add one teaspoon salt. Simmer until the vegetables are tender--about thirty minutes. Rub through a sieve. Mix the flour smoothly with a little of the milk. Put the potato and rest of the milk back on the stove into the saucepan; when boiling, add the flour, and cook for ten minutes. Add the peas. Season and serve.
A plain potato-and-leek purée thinned with milk — the sort of soup that carried a meatless dinner. Two things need translating: the imperial liquid measures and the sieve.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. The 1 1/2 pints of water is about 3 3/4 cups and the pint of milk about 2 1/2 cups.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz. Half a gill of peas is therefore roughly 1/4 cup — a garnish, not a main ingredient.
- Small weights1/2 oz flour is about 2 tablespoons; 3/4 oz butter is about 1 1/2 tablespoons. Both are given by weight in the original, as was usual in British recipe books of the period.
- Spanish onionsSimply large mild yellow onions. A quarter pound is one medium onion. Leeks give the cleaner, sweeter result the name "white soup" implies.
- Rub through a sieveA blender or stick blender does this in seconds. Keep it brief with potato — over-processing turns the starch gluey. A food mill or ricer is the closest match to the original texture.
- The hingeSweat the vegetables in butter without letting them colour. Any browning of the onion or leek tints the finished soup and defeats the whole point of it.
- ThickeningSlake the flour in cold milk, then add it to the boiling soup while stirring. The ten minutes of cooking is not padding — it is what cooks out the raw-flour taste.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, serving four as a first course or two or three as a light supper with bread.
Meatless cookery of this era was written for Lent, for Fridays, for vegetarians on principle, and — in the books published around the First World War and after — for households where meat was scarce or dear. "White soup" is an old English kitchen category rather than a single dish: historically it meant a pale soup thickened with cream and pounded almonds and built on veal or fowl stock, the sort of thing served at supper after a ball. What survives here is only the colour and the ambition. The stock has become boiling water, the almonds a spoonful of flour, and the body comes from potato, an ingredient cheap enough to make a meatless soup genuinely economical. The handful of green peas at the end does the work that a garnish always does in this tradition: it signals that someone cared how the bowl looked.