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Cream of Potato Soup
1 pt. sweet milk. 1 cup creamed Irish potatoes. 1 pt. cream sauce. 1 small onion, grated. 1 stalk celery, cut fine. 2 yolks of eggs. Have sauce warm and add potatoes while warm. When thoroughly blended add milk, onion, celery, and just before serving add the beaten yolks of the eggs.
A leftovers soup built on two pantry staples of 1920 — a pot of cream sauce and yesterday's creamed potatoes. The written method assumes you know what both are, and gives no seasoning, no cooking time and no yield.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolks go in the soup must not boil, or it will curdle into grainy threads. Temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of hot soup first, stir them back in off the heat, and serve at once.
- Cream sauceA medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk per cup of sauce, cooked until it coats a spoon. One pint means doubling that.
- Creamed Irish potatoes"Irish potato" simply distinguishes an ordinary white potato from a sweet potato — standard American usage of the period. Creamed potatoes here are cooked potatoes held in a little white sauce or milk; a cup of leftover mashed potato loosened with hot milk is a reasonable stand-in, though it will give a smoother soup than diced creamed potatoes.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were separate kitchen ingredients.
- The celery and onionBoth go in raw and get only a few minutes of warming. Simmer them in the milk for 8 to 10 minutes before combining if you want the celery tender rather than crunchy, or sweat them in the butter at the white-sauce stage.
- SeasoningNone is specified. It needs roughly a teaspoon of salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg if you like.
- TextureAs written the soup is chunky. For a smooth cream of potato, blend before the yolks go in, then bring back to just below a simmer.
- YieldAbout a quart and a quarter — four first-course servings.
- Raw yolkThe yolks are only warmed through, not cooked to a safe temperature. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to the post-war American kitchen, when the food-conservation habits of 1917-18 had hardened into ordinary household economy, and this soup is a clear specimen of the type: a cup of yesterday's creamed potatoes and a pint of cream sauce, stretched with milk into a first course for four. The thickening of soup with beaten egg yolks is older, generally traced to French practice and standard in nineteenth-century English and American cookery before, it is often said, cornstarch and canned condensed soups displaced it. The phrase "Irish potato" is a regional Americanism that survived well into the twentieth century, distinguishing the white potato from the sweet potato, which in much of the South was said to be simply "the potato" unless otherwise named.