Cream Soups
This is the foundation or sauce for many fish and vegetable cream soups. 1 quart milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon white pepper 2 tablespoons flour 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup boiling water Scald milk and add seasoning; thicken with flour and butter rubbed to a cream with boiling water and boil two minutes.
For pea soup boil and mash one pint green peas and add to sauce. For cream of celery boil 1 pint cut celery until tender; rub through sieve, add to milk, and proceed as above.
For potato soup use 6 large or 10 medium sized potatoes boiled and mashed fine. Stir into milk, proceed as above, and strain. A tablespoon chopped parsley may be lightly stirred in just before serving. For corn soup use same foundation, adding can of corn (chopped), or corn cut from 6 ears boiled fresh corn, 1 tablespoon sugar, and boil 15 minutes. For cream of fish soup take about one pound of boiled fish; rub through sieve; stir into milk and add thickening.
Royal Baking Powder Never Disturbs Digestion
A single thin white-sauce base with five variations hung off it — the working method of a period kitchen that wanted one technique to cover the whole soup course. A few of its proportions and habits need adjusting.
- The thickening is the hingeRubbing the flour and butter to a cream with boiling water makes a loose paste, not a roux, and it must go into the scalded milk in a thin stream with constant whisking or it will set in lumps. The two-minute boil afterwards is the minimum needed to cook out the raw flour taste; less and the soup tastes pasty.
- Scalding milkScalded means heated to about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge and the surface begins to steam. It should not reach a rolling boil before the flour goes in, or it will skin and catch on the bottom.
- A teaspoon of white pepper is a lotA full teaspoon in five cups of thin base is aggressive by modern taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon and work up, or the base will overwhelm the peas, celery or fish it is meant to carry.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to five cups of liquid gives a very thin soup by modern expectation, nearer a broth than a bisque. Doubling both flour and butter, keeping the recipe's own 2:1 ratio of flour to butter, gives a fuller-bodied result.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the labour the recipe assumes and the step where the texture is made. A food mill or a blender followed by a fine sieve does the same work; skipping the sieve entirely leaves celery strings and pea skins in suspension.
- Corn and fishFifteen minutes' boiling suits canned corn of the era but will flatten fresh corn cut from the cob — five minutes is enough. The fish must be already cooked before it is sieved in; once it is added, hold the soup below a boil so it does not turn grainy.
- YieldThe base makes about five cups; with any of the additions it serves four to six as a first course.
- The taglineThe closing line about digestion is advertising copy from the publisher, not part of the method. No baking powder goes into any of these soups.
Cream soups of this kind — a milk base bound with flour and butter, then flavoured with a purée of one vegetable — were a fixture of American cookery schools from the 1890s onward, and their orderly one-base-many-variations format is often said to owe a good deal to the way Boston Cooking School teaching was structured around a small set of master sauces, though the connection is an inference rather than a documented one. The New Royal Cook Book itself is a promotional volume issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which produced a long series of free and cheap cookbooks to keep its tin in American kitchens; the slogan tacked to the end of this page is a trace of the era's baking powder rivalry, in which Royal, a cream-of-tartar powder, campaigned hard against cheaper alum-based competitors on grounds of wholesomeness. The soups are not an advertisement for anything in particular — they are ballast, the useful everyday material that made the pamphlet worth keeping on the shelf next to the stove.