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Cream of Potato
2 medium-sized potatoes 1/4 tablespoon chopped onion 1 pint cream stock 1 bay leaf 1 sprig parsley Pare the potatoes and let them soak in cold water for half an hour; then put them in boiling water with the bay leaf and onion, and when soft drain off the water and mash, saving the water and returning the mashed potatoes to it. Strain through a sieve and add the cream stock slowly. Just before serving add the parsley, finely chopped.
A skeleton recipe of the kind cookery-school books printed to be read alongside a chapter of basic preparations. Two things need filling in: what "cream stock" was, and the fact that no salt is mentioned anywhere.
- Cream stockThe term is not defined here; in books of this period it generally means a thin milk-based white sauce or thickened milk rather than heavy cream. A roux of butter and flour with hot milk whisked in and simmered smooth is the usual reading. Substituting straight cream will give a soup richer and looser than intended.
- Season it yourselfNo salt or pepper appears in the text; the seasoning may have been left to the foundation stock recipe printed elsewhere. Salt the potato water, and taste and correct again after the cream stock goes in; unseasoned potato and milk is very flat.
- The onion measureA quarter tablespoon is about three-quarters of a teaspoon — a deliberate whisper of onion, not a base. Scale it up only if you want the soup to taste of onion rather than potato.
- Soaking the potatoesThe half-hour soak draws out surface starch. It is optional with today's potatoes, though it may help keep the finished soup from turning gluey.
- Save the cooking waterThe instruction to return the mash to its own water matters: apart from the cream stock, that water is the only liquid carrying flavour from the vegetable. Pull the bay leaf before mashing.
- StrainingPush the potato through a fine sieve or a food mill rather than a blender. High-speed blending ruptures potato starch cells and produces a gummy, elastic texture that no amount of thinning will fix.
- Adding the cream stockAdd it slowly and off a hard boil. Once combined, bring the soup back only to a bare simmer; a rolling boil will make the milk base separate and catch on the bottom.
- YieldTwo potatoes plus a pint of base, with the reserved cooking water, makes roughly three to four cups: two generous servings or four small first-course cups.
Cream soups of this kind — a purée of one vegetable let down with a thin white sauce — were common in American domestic-science cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, taught as a single method with the vegetable swapped out for celery, asparagus, corn or peas. This one calls for "cream stock" as if the reader already had the foundation preparation to hand. It depends on the two aromatics named: a bay leaf simmered with the potato and raw parsley stirred in at the last moment, added late so the green flavour survives the heat.