Cream Soups
A NICE FOUNDATION FOR ALL CREAM SOUPS.
I find this the most satisfactory way to make any kind of cream soups. Use the following proportions: 1 pt. sweet milk. 1 heaping tablespoon flour. 2 tablespoons butter.
Melt butter in double boiler. Add flour and blend well. Then add milk, a little at the time. Stir constantly until thick and there is no raw taste of flour.
This is a thin béchamel meant as a base: cook it once, then thin it with vegetable purée or cooking water to make any cream soup. The original assumes you know what to do next, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh, unsoured whole milk. Old recipes distinguished it from buttermilk and clabbered milk, which were both common in the pantry. Whole milk gives the body the recipe expects; skim will taste thin.
- The double boilerIt exists here to keep the milk from scorching, since flour-thickened milk catches on direct heat. A heavy saucepan over medium-low heat works and is faster, but you must stir the bottom continuously.
- Cook the flour firstThis is the hinge. Blend the flour into the melted butter and let it bubble briefly before any milk goes in, and keep whisking after the milk is in until the raw, pasty taste is gone, as the recipe directs; a few minutes at a bare simmer is usually enough. Undercooked flour is a common fault in cream soups.
- Milk temperatureAdding the milk warm, a ladle at a time, gives a smoother result and cuts the cooking time. Cold milk works if you add it gradually and whisk; dumping it in all at once guarantees lumps.
- Proportions and thicknessOne heaping tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk is a light sauce, deliberately loose because it will be diluted further. For a soup you will serve as-is, use two level tablespoons of flour.
- No seasoning is givenSalt and pepper are left to the cook. Figure roughly half a teaspoon of salt per pint, added at the end, plus white pepper and a grating of nutmeg if the soup is celery, cauliflower or potato.
- Turning it into soupAdd an equal volume of puréed cooked vegetable, or vegetable and its cooking liquid, to the finished pint. Acidic additions such as tomato will curdle milk; add the tomato to the hot base off the heat and serve at once, or thicken tomato soup separately.
- YieldA pint of base plus a pint of purée serves four as a first course.
The recipe teaches a method rather than a dish, which is what makes this entry typical of American cookbooks: one master formula, then variations by vegetable. The technique itself is the French béchamel, flour cooked in butter and let down with milk, which is generally said to have been long established in English-language kitchens and was by then the backbone of home cooking — creamed vegetables, croquette binding, scalloped dishes and cream soups all came off it. The double boiler it calls for was a fixture of the period's coal and early gas ranges, where low, even heat was hard to hold; it protected milk dishes from a hot spot that would scorch them. Cream soups were also a thrift measure, stretching a small amount of leftover vegetable into a course for a family with a pint of milk and a spoonful of flour.