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Celery Soup
The contents of a can of American Celery Soup will make 6 cups of delicious soup. Place 1¾ ounces of condensed soup in a fine china cup, and fill with very hot water. Fill the cup with hot water to warm it before using. Keep the condensed soup in a small, covered, silver-plated tureen, and use a silver-plated ladle.
This is fountain service rather than cookery: a portion instruction for reconstituting canned condensed soup one cup at a time, in the era when the soda counter doubled as a lunch counter.
- The 1¾ ounces per cupThe printed page was checked; the measure is 1¾ ounces of condensed soup per cup, as our text now gives. Six portions at that rate come to about 10½ ounces, close to the familiar condensed soup can size.
- It is much thinner than package directionsModern labels call for equal parts soup and water, giving roughly 2½ cups per can. Here one can stretches to six cups, so expect a light drinking broth meant to be sipped from a cup, not a bowl of soup.
- Hot water, not boilingHot water -- The recipe calls only for "very hot water" to fill the cup; celery aroma is volatile, so there is no advantage in scalding it.
- Warm the cup firstThe instruction to fill the cup with hot water and dump it is not fussiness. A thin 1¾-ounce portion in a cold china cup drops below drinking temperature almost at once.
- Stir hard, then check saltCondensed soup is a thick gel and will sit at the bottom of a cup unless worked in with the ladle or a spoon. At this dilution the seasoning falls off sharply; a pinch of salt and white pepper per cup brings it back.
- Holding the concentrateThe book has the undiluted soup sitting in a covered tureen at counter temperature. Keep it refrigerated instead and ladle from a chilled container, or hold it hot; several hours in the danger zone is the one part of this routine worth abandoning.
- The silver plateSilver-plated tureen and ladle were about the look of the counter, not the cooking. Any non-reactive ladle and covered container do the same job.
- YieldOne 10½-ounce can, six cups, served as a hot beverage-sized course.
Condensed soup was still comparatively new when books like this were written: the reduced-water canning process that made it shippable is generally credited to John T. Dorrance at the Campbell company in the late 1890s, and condensed soup soon became a fixture of drugstore and department-store fountains. Selling it by the cup rather than the bowl suited the fountain, which already had hot water, china cups and a dispenser's habit of building each order to a fixed measure. Celery also fit the period's view of celery as a nervine and digestive as much as a vegetable; celery tonics, celery phosphates and celery sodas appear alongside it in fountain manuals of the period. The silver-plated tureen and ladle belong to the same commercial logic as the marble counter: what the customer saw was part of what was being sold.