Cream Stock
1 pint milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Red or black pepper Melt the butter over the fire and add the flour, being careful not to let it brown. Add the milk gradually, stirring constantly to prevent lumps; then add the seasoning.
This cream sauce is used instead of stock as the foundation for many soups. 2 pounds lean beaf 1 small knuckle veal 2 tablespoons butter 1 small onion
A thin béchamel doing duty as a soup base — one tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of milk, which is lighter than a standard white sauce and meant to be diluted further with purées and vegetable water.
- The hinge: keep the roux blondThe butter and flour should cook together for a minute or two until they smell nutty but stay pale straw. Any browning colors the finished soup and weakens the thickening power of the flour.
- YieldMakes about 2 cups of light cream base, which once vegetable purée and its cooking liquid are added would stretch to roughly four servings of soup; the recipe itself gives no yield.
- Red pepper"Red pepper" in American books of this era means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A pinch is the intended dose.
- Heat control"Over the fire" means direct heat; milk sauces scorch readily on a modern gas or induction burner. Medium-low, or a heavy pan, and stir into the corners.
- LumpsAdd the milk in three or four additions, whisking each smooth before the next. Warm milk incorporates faster than cold, though either works if you are patient.
- ConsistencyAt this ratio the sauce barely coats a spoon. That is deliberate — it is a foundation, not a finished sauce, and thickening it further will give you a pasty soup.
- The stray lines at the end"2 pounds lean beaf, 1 small knuckle veal, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 small onion" is the opening of a separate meat-stock recipe that has been carried over with this page. It has nothing to do with the cream stock above and should be ignored.
Cream soups built on a milk-and-flour base rather than meat broth were a mainstay of turn-of-the-century American domestic cookery, promoted heavily through the cooking-school movement, and comparable "thin white sauce" formulas appear in the standard cooking-school books of the period — though those are generally richer than this one, which uses only a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a full pint of milk. The appeal was practical: a household without a stockpot on the back of the range could still put a cream of celery, tomato, or asparagus on the table in twenty minutes, using milk that was delivered daily and flour that kept indefinitely. Calling it a "stock" positions the sauce as the equal of a meat foundation in a kitchen that had neither the time nor the bones for one.