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Cream of Artichoke Soup
6 artichokes 4 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1½ teaspoons salt Few grains cayenne Few gratings nutmeg 2 tablespoons Sauterne wine 1 cup scalded cream 1 egg 2 cucumbers Cook artichokes in boiling water until soft, and rub through a sieve. Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, pour on hot liquor, and cook one minute. Add cream, wine, and egg slightly beaten. Pare cucumbers, cut in one-third inch cubes, sauté in butter, and add to soup. Jerusalem artichokes are used for the making of this soup.
Celery Soup I 3 cups celery (cut in one-half inch pieces) 1 pint boiling water 2½ cups milk 1 slice onion 3 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup flour Salt and pepper Wash and scrape celery before cutting in pieces, cook in boiling water until soft, and rub through a sieve. Scald milk with the onion, remove onion, and add milk to celery. Bind with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper. Outer and old stalks of celery may be utilized for soups. Serve with croûtons, crisp crackers, or pulled bread.
A smooth purée soup from the stockless chapter, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and finished with egg and cream. It is built on Jerusalem artichokes, as the closing line specifies, not globe artichokes.
- The artichokesNo quantity is given for them in the ingredient list, so use judgement: about 1½ lb of Jerusalem artichokes to 4 cups of water gives a soup of the right body. Scrub them well; the skins slip off easily after cooking and the flesh goes through a sieve without trouble.
- Jerusalem artichoke, not globeSold now as sunchokes. They are the tubers of a perennial sunflower and have nothing to do with globe artichokes; the sweet, nutty flavour and the way they purée to silk are what this soup is after.
- The hinge: the eggAdd the beaten egg off the heat, after the cream, and do not let the soup boil again. Whisk a ladle of the hot soup into the egg first, then return it. Boiling at this point curdles the egg into threads and the texture is gone.
- Hot liquorThe "hot liquor" is the artichoke cooking water plus the sieved purée. Keep it hot when it goes onto the roux and whisk hard, or the flour will lump.
- Scalded creamScalding means heating just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, not boiling. With pasteurised cream this is only a matter of getting it hot so it does not chill the soup.
- SauterneMost likely a dry to off-dry white in the loose American usage of the period rather than sweet Bordeaux Sauternes, though the recipe does not specify. Two tablespoons of a decent dry white will serve; the recipe adds it with the cream, not at the end.
- The cucumber garnishPare, seed if the cucumbers are large, and cut in ⅓-inch cubes. Sauté in butter only until the edges colour and they still have bite, a couple of minutes; longer and they collapse into the soup.
- YieldRoughly 1½ quarts, serving six as a first course.
The Jerusalem artichoke is a North American plant, cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before European contact and carried back to Europe in the early seventeenth century; the name is often said to come from a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, with "artichoke" attached for the taste of the cooked tuber, though that derivation is contested and may be folk etymology. Fannie Farmer's soup chapter divides sharply between soups built on meat stock and those built on a vegetable purée bound with a white roux, and this belongs firmly to the second group — the same formula as her cream of celery, cream of asparagus and the rest, with only the vegetable changed. The wine, the nutmeg and the sautéed cucumber cubes mark it as a company dish rather than a family one, the sort of first course a Boston household of 1896 would serve at a dinner with courses.