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Laboratory Exercises (T powd crackers t salt slice)
5 T. powd. crackers t. salt 1 slice onion 1 C. boiling water 1 C. milk 1 t. butter 1. Scald milk and onion in double boiler. 2. Stir boiling water into the powdered crackers and boil two minutes. 3.
Remove onion and add milk to crackers and water. 4. Return to double boiler and cook ten minutes. 5. Add butter and salt and serve hot.
Cream of Corn Soup. 2 C. corn 2 C. boiling water 2 C. milk 2 slices onion 2 T. butter 2 T. flour 1½ t. salt spk. pepper 1. Chop corn, add water and simmer fifteen minutes, then rub through strainer. 2. Mix flour with 2 T. cold water and stir into strained vegetable pulp. Boil two minutes, stirring constantly. 3. Scald milk with onion. Remove onion and add milk t thickened corn pulp. 4. Reheat but do not boil. 5. Add butter and serve hot.
Potato Soup. 3 medium sized potatoes 1½ t. salt 4 C. milk 3 T. butter 3 T. flour spk. pepper 2 slices onion 1 t. chopped parsley 1. Make white sauce of butter, flour, salt, pepper and milk. 2. Boil potatoes and onion together. When soft, drain and press through a ricer. 3. Add white sauce gradually to the mashed potato. 4. Reheat but do not boil.
Three cream soups from a school laboratory manual, written in the clipped abbreviations students were expected to decode at the bench. The measurements are standard American ones, but a few quantities have been dropped in transcription.
- The abbreviationsT. is a tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, C. a cup, and "spk." a speck — roughly a pinch, less than an eighth of a teaspoon. The first soup makes about two cups; the corn and potato soups closer to five or six.
- A missing numberThe first soup lists "t. salt" with no quantity in front of it, and that recipe has also lost its own title line. Salt to taste; a half teaspoon suits two cups of liquid and is in line with the ratios in the other two recipes.
- Powdered crackersPlain soda or water crackers crushed to a fine meal, not seasoned or buttery ones. Five tablespoons is roughly six to eight saltines rolled out under a pin or pulsed in a processor. They are the whole thickening for that soup.
- The double boilerIt is not fussiness. Milk thickened with cracker meal or potato scorches instantly over direct heat, and a scorched cream soup cannot be rescued. A heavy saucepan over low heat with frequent stirring will do if you have no double boiler.
- Scalding milk with onionThis is the flavour hinge in the first two soups. Bring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, hold the onion in it a few minutes, then lift the onion out. Boiling the milk gives it a cooked, faintly sulphurous taste.
- Reheat but do not boilRepeated twice for good reason. Once milk and a starchy purée are combined, a hard boil will thin the starch back out or break the soup. Bring it to steaming and stop.
- The cornTwo cups means kernels, fresh cut from about four ears or drained from canned corn. "Chop" then "rub through a strainer" is the pre-blender route to a smooth purée; a blender followed by a sieve is faster and loses less.
- Potato soup consistencyRiced potato keeps thickening as it stands, and this soup will be much stiffer cold than hot. Thin with additional hot milk when reheating, and add the parsley — listed but never called for in the steps — at the very end.
This page comes from a students' manual, not a cookbook, and it reads like one: no headnotes, no yields, just the bench work. Cream soups were a staple of the domestic-science classroom in the first decades of the twentieth century because they taught one principle in several variations — a thin white sauce as the base, with the vegetable, the starch or the cracker meal doing the rest. A student who could make potato soup could make asparagus, celery or pea soup without a new lesson. The onion scalded in milk and then discarded is a signature of that school of cooking, which favoured mild, pale, easily digested food and treated strong flavours as something to be borrowed rather than served.