Home › Creamed Soups › Creamed Soups
Creamed Soups
5. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the top and serve hot. Cream of Tomato Soup. 1 qt. tomatoes 1 T. sugar 2 slices onion 1 qt. milk 4 T. butter 4 T. flour 1½ t. salt spk. pepper 1. Cook tomato, sugar and onion together, then rub through a strainer. 2. Melt butter, add flour, salt and pepper and cook until it bubbles. Add strained tomato and boil two minutes, stirring constantly. 3. Scald milk and add to tomato just before serving. Cream of Asparagus Soup. 1 can of asparagus 2+ C. of water 1 slice onion spk. pepper 2½ C. milk 4 T. butter 4 T. flour 1½ t. salt 1. Remove tips of asparagus and save to use as garnish for soup. 2. Cook stalks, water and onion together for twenty minutes then rub through a strainer. 3. Make white sauce of flour, butter and milk and add to strained asparagus. 4. Season with salt and pepper, add asparagus tips and reheat, but do not boil. 5. Serve hot with toast fingers.
Cream of Salmon Soup. 1 C. canned salmon 1½ t. salt spk. pepper 4 C. milk 2 T. butter 4 T. flour 1. Remove bones and skin and pick salmon to pieces. Put through meat grinder or rub to a paste with a wooden spoon. 2. Make a white sauce of butter, flour, salt and pepper and add gradually to the salmon. 3. Reheat and serve hot with croutons.
Croutons.
Cut stale bread into one-third inch cubes. Put in pan and bake until a light brown. Stir occasionally so that they will brown evenly.
Toast Fingers or Imperial Sticks.
Cut stale bread into one-third inch slices. Cut slices into one-third inch strips and brown in oven.
Bread Sticks.
Roll bread dough into strips eight inches long and about the size of a lead pencil. Let rise until twice the size, then bake in quick oven until crisp and brown.
A cluster of domestic-science cream soups built on the same base: a butter-and-flour white sauce thinned with milk and a strained vegetable or fish purée. The measurements are the standard abbreviations of the period.
- AbbreviationsT. is a level tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, C. a cup, qt. a quart (4 cups). "spk." means a speck — less than an eighth of a teaspoon, essentially a pinch.
- The hinge: curdlingIn the tomato soup, the acid will curdle milk if the two sit together over heat. The instruction to scald the milk and add it "just before serving" is the point of the method; the recipe directs the hot milk into the tomato base at the last moment, off the boil, and it is served at once.
- 1 qt. tomatoesCanned tomatoes, or fresh in season; a quart is roughly two 14-oz cans with their juice. The sugar is there to balance the acid of the tomatoes and can be reduced to taste.
- "2+ C. of water"The mark is most likely a typographical fraction lost in transcription; treat it as 2 to 2½ cups, and judge by how much liquid the asparagus stalks need to simmer covered.
- Canned asparagus and salmonCanned asparagus is soft and salty; a pound of fresh spears will do the same job, with the tips blanched separately for garnish. Canned salmon bones are soft and edible and add calcium, though the recipe's habit of removing them gives a smoother purée.
- Do not boil the finished soupsOnce milk and a flour-thickened sauce are combined, a hard boil will scorch the bottom and roughen the texture. The asparagus soup says so explicitly; apply it to the salmon soup too.
- Croutons and toast fingersThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, stirring, for roughly 12 to 18 minutes until dry and light brown will do it. "Stale" bread here means a day or two old and firm, not moldy.
- Bread sticks in a "quick oven"Period tables put a quick oven at roughly 400 to 450F. Pencil-thin sticks will crisp in about 12 to 15 minutes; watch them, as they go from brown to burnt quickly at that heat.
- YieldThe tomato soup makes about 2 quarts, six to eight first-course servings; the asparagus and salmon soups are smaller, closer to 1¼ quarts each, or four first-course servings.
This page comes out of the domestic-science movement that shaped American cooking instruction from the 1890s through the 1920s, when household arts was a graded school subject and recipes were written to teach a principle rather than a dish. The principle here is thin white sauce: a fixed ratio of butter, flour and milk that, once mastered, could be turned into cream of anything by adding a strained purée — tomato, asparagus, salmon, celery, pea. Cream soups spread through American home cooking largely on the back of the canning of vegetables and salmon, which made asparagus and Pacific salmon year-round pantry staples in inland kitchens. The accompaniments are equally characteristic of the period's thrift: croutons, toast fingers and bread sticks all begin with bread that has gone stale, and the book simply lists "Imperial sticks" as an alternative name for what is simply dried, browned bread.