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Cayenne (Cut leeks and celery in very)
Cut leeks and celery in very thin slices crosswise and cook in two and one-half tablespoons butter, stirring constantly, ten minutes. Add milk, and cook in double boiler forty minutes. Cut potatoes in slices and cut slices in small pieces; then cook in boiling salted water ten minutes. Melt two tablespoons butter, add flour, milk with vegetables and potatoes. Cook until potatoes are soft, and season with salt, pepper, and cayenne. 1/3 cup carrot 1/3 cup turnip ½ cup celery
This is a cream-of-vegetable soup in the Farmer style: a milk base infused with aromatics in a double boiler, thickened at the end with a butter-and-flour roux. As printed here the ingredient list has come adrift from the method, so read it as a technique rather than a set of measurements.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for leeks, celery, potatoes, milk and flour, but the printed list gives only ½ cup carrot, 1/3 cup turnip and 1½ cup celery — vegetables that mostly do not appear in the instructions. There is no honest way to recover the intended amounts; for a workable soup, figure roughly 4 cups milk, 2 medium potatoes, 2 leeks and about 2 tablespoons flour.
- Double boilerForty minutes over simmering water is there to keep milk from scorching or catching on the pan bottom. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over the lowest heat does the same job, provided you stir occasionally and never let it reach a boil.
- Sweat, do not brownThe ten minutes of constant stirring in butter is a sweat. If the leeks take colour the soup turns beige and tastes of fried onion rather than the clean sweetness the recipe is after.
- Clean the leeks properlyGrit sits between the layers. Slice crosswise as directed, then swish the rings in a bowl of cold water and lift them out, leaving the sand behind.
- The roux stepMelt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute before adding any liquid, then add the hot milk gradually. Dumping cold flour into hot milk is the reliable route to lumps.
- CayenneThe title ingredient is a finishing seasoning, not a base note. A pinch at the end — an eighth of a teaspoon in a pot this size — is enough to lift the milk without reading as heat.
- YieldMade at the proportions above, about 1½ quarts, or four generous first-course servings.
The page names no source, but the style points — as an inference rather than an attribution — to something like Fannie Farmer's "Soups Without Stock" chapter, which answers a real constraint: a household that had not roasted a joint that week had no stockpot to draw on, and milk may well have been the cheapest body available. These milk-and-vegetable purees — leek and potato, celery, corn, oyster — do most of the work of a cream soup with a butter-and-flour thickening rather than egg yolks or long reduction, which is why the double boiler appears so often in the section. Why the ingredient line here is garbled cannot be settled from the page itself.