Home › Soups Without Stock › Appledore Soup (Make same as Potato Soup)
Appledore Soup (Make same as Potato Soup)
Make same as Potato Soup, and add, just before serving, three tablespoons tomato catsup.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the potato soup printed alongside it. The whole trick is the catsup and when it goes in.
- The base you needThe potato soup this leans on is the ordinary period sort: potatoes cooked and forced through a sieve, scalded milk infused with onion, and a butter-flour roux, seasoned with salt, pepper, celery salt and chopped parsley. Any smooth, milk-based potato soup will stand in.
- Off the heat, at the last momentThis is the hinge. Tomato catsup is acidic and a milk soup will curdle if it is stirred in and then boiled. Take the pan off the burner, stir the catsup through, and serve.
- What catsup meant in 1896What catsup meant then -- tomato catsup of the period was generally thinner, sharper with vinegar and more heavily spiced with clove, allspice and cayenne than modern bottled ketchup, and usually less sweet. Three tablespoons of today's product will read sugary; a spoonful of tomato paste with a splash of cider vinegar gets closer to the intent.
- Sieve, not blenderPressing cooked potato through a sieve or ricer gives the light, slightly grainy body the recipe expects. A blender or food processor works the starch and turns potato soup gluey.
- Seasoning after the additionCatsup brings its own salt and acid. Season the soup lightly at the base stage and correct once the catsup is in.
- YieldNo yield is given; a quart of milk plus the potatoes will serve about four. Serve at once, as the colour tends to dull and the soup thickens on standing.
Appledore is the largest of the Isles of Shoals, the cluster of rocky islands commonly described as off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, though Appledore Island itself lies in Maine, in the town of Kittery; it was the site of the Appledore House, one of the best-known New England summer hotels of the nineteenth century and the gathering place around the poet Celia Thaxter. Dishes carrying resort and hotel names were common in cookbooks of this era, and the connection is generally traced to that hotel rather than to any documented original recipe. What the entry really shows is how a late-Victorian kitchen generated variety: a single well-drilled base soup, then a small closing addition and a new name on the menu card. The presence of bottled catsup as that addition is itself of the moment, since commercially produced tomato catsup had by the 1890s become a standard pantry item of tomato, vinegar and spice.