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Cream of Lettuce Soup
Salt. 2½ cups White Stock II or III 2 heads lettuce finely cut 2 tablespoons rice 1/2 cup cream ¼ tablespoon onion, finely chopped 1 tablespoon butter Yolk 1 egg Few grains nutmeg
This is one of Fannie Farmer's cream soups built on a light stock rather than milk, with rice as the thickener and an egg yolk to finish. The ingredient list is all the original gives, so the sequence below fills in what the book assumes its readers already knew.
- The hinge: the egg yolkBeat the yolk with the cream, then temper it with a ladle of the hot soup before returning it to the pan. Once it goes in, keep the soup below a simmer -- around 170-175F. A boil will scramble the yolk and leave grainy threads through the purée.
- White Stock II or IIIFarmer's white stocks are pale, unbrowned broths, generally veal or veal with fowl. A good low-sodium chicken stock is the closest substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily roasted, which will overwhelm the lettuce.
- "14 tablespoon onion"Read this as a quarter tablespoon, roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of very finely chopped onion. It is meant as a background note, not a flavour in its own right.
- The riceTwo tablespoons of raw white rice, simmered in the stock until quite soft (about 25-30 minutes), is the thickening. Puree it with the lettuce and press through a sieve, or use a blender; a sieve would be the usual period route to smoothness, though this ingredient list gives no directions.
- LettuceTwo heads means two heads of the loose, soft lettuce of the period -- closer to a modern butterhead or the outer leaves of romaine than to a dense iceberg. Adding it late in the simmering helps it keep its colour.
- ButterCook the onion gently in the butter before the stock goes in, or whisk it in at the end for gloss. Either reading is plausible; the ingredient list does not say which.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little; pre-ground nutmeg loses its top notes and will taste dusty in a soup this delicate.
- YieldAbout three cups finished -- two generous first-course servings, or three small cups. Salt at the very end, after the stock has reduced.
Lettuce soup is often said to be a thrift dish before it is a luxury one, using up outer leaves and heads that have begun to bolt in summer heat, when a kitchen garden produces more lettuce than a household can eat raw -- though the recipe itself simply calls for two heads, finely cut. French cookery treats it as a potage, usually bound with rice or a little bread and enriched at the last moment with cream and egg yolk, and it is that lineage the Boston Cooking-School book is drawing on -- Fannie Farmer's soup chapter is full of cream soups organised as a system, each one a stock, a vegetable, a starch thickener and a dairy finish. The egg-yolk liaison here marks it as a slightly more formal preparation than the plain milk-and-flour cream soups elsewhere in the same section, the sort of thing served in cups at a luncheon rather than in bowls at supper.