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Potato Soup (INGREDIENTS for soup)
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons. -4 lbs. of mealy potatoes, boiled or steamed very dry, pepper and salt to taste, 2 quarts of stock. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Mash the boiled potatoes smoothly, that no lumps remain, and gradually put them to the boiling stock; pass it through a sieve, season and simmer for 5 minutes.
Skim well, and serve with fried bread.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
A three-ingredient soup that lives or dies on the stock and on how dry the potatoes are. Mrs Beeton's version is deliberately plain — the fried bread is not a garnish so much as the seasoning.
- Scale and yield4 lb of potatoes to 2 quarts of stock serves eight generously as a first course. Halved (2 lb potatoes, 1 quart stock) it makes four bowls without any other adjustment.
- "Mealy" potatoesThis means a floury, high-starch variety — Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper. Waxy salad potatoes will not mash smoothly into the stock and give a gluey rather than a velvety body.
- Boiled or steamed very dryThe hinge of the recipe. Drain the potatoes and return them to the dry hot pan for a minute or two to drive off steam before mashing; wet potatoes thin the soup and dull the flavour, and no amount of sieving will fix it.
- Do not overwork the starchMash and sieve by hand, or push through a food mill or ricer. A blender or food processor ruptures the starch granules and turns potato soup to wallpaper paste in seconds.
- The stock is the recipeWith no aromatics, no cream and no butter listed, everything depends on the 2 quarts of stock. The recipe specifies nothing beyond 'stock', so a good meat stock is the sensible reading; commercial cubes will taste of salt and little else.
- TimingThe stated "TIME. hour" is missing its numeral in the original; the working instruction is to simmer 5 minutes after sieving, which is all the soup itself needs. Any longer time must cover cooking the potatoes beforehand.
- Fried breadSmall cubes of stale bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp, added at the table so they do not soften. Bread toasted dry is not the same thing and the soup will taste bare without the fat.
- Seasonable September to MarchA note about main-crop storage potatoes, which are mealier than new potatoes. It has no force now, though the soup is still better with old potatoes than with early ones.
Potato soup of this kind — potato, stock, pepper, salt — is the plainest form of a dish that runs through nineteenth-century British and Irish cookery, where the potato was cheap bulk and the stock carried whatever meat flavour a household could afford. Mrs Beeton's costing of 1s. 6d. for eight people is the point of the entry as much as the method: it belongs to the run of economical soups in her book, alongside the various "soups without meat" and the receipts for using up stock and bones. The refinement of the same idea, enriched with leeks and cream, is generally traced to French kitchens and became familiar in Britain later under names such as potage parmentier, after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the French agronomist remembered for promoting the potato as human food. The version here makes no claim to that gentility — it is a soup for filling people up.