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Cream of Mushroom Soup
2 tablespoons Sauterne 1/2 lb. mushrooms 1/4 cup flour 4 cups White Stock III 1 cup cream 1 slice onion
This is the ingredient line only; Fannie Farmer's cream soups all follow one method laid out earlier in the chapter, so the page assumes you know the pattern. Here is what it takes to read it.
- The missing fatThe ingredient line names no butter, yet a quarter cup of flour needs fat to keep it from clumping in the stock; the book's white-sauce proportions run to roughly equal butter and flour, which would put about 1/4 cup butter against this 1/4 cup flour.
- The method it assumesReconstructed from the chapter's pattern: chop the mushrooms and cook them gently with the onion slice, add the stock and simmer until the flavour is drawn out, then thicken with the butter-and-flour roux, strain or leave rustic, and finish with the cream. Season with salt and pepper; the ingredient line lists none.
- White Stock IIIA light stock from veal knuckle or fowl, unbrowned and mildly seasoned. Four cups of unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- 1 slice onionLiterally one thin round cut from a peeled onion, a flavouring rather than a base; if the soup is strained it comes out with the solids.
- CreamRead this as light cream or half-and-half rather than heavy whipping cream; nineteenth-century 'cream' was not standardised. Add it at the end and keep the pot below a simmer, since boiling after the cream goes in can curdle it.
- The mushroomsHalf a pound of cultivated mushrooms; period recipes routinely direct peeling, while modern buttons and creminis need only wiping, and the stems belong in the pot for flavour.
- YieldRoughly five cups, serving four as a first course.
Cream soups occupy a whole run of pages in the Boston Cooking-School book: one formula — thickened stock or milk plus a flavouring purée plus cream — repeated across asparagus, celery, corn, and mushroom, so a student learned proportion rather than a list of dishes. Mushrooms were still a comparative luxury when this was written; commercial cultivation in the United States, largely concentrated in Pennsylvania, had begun only in the 1880s, so a half pound of fresh mushrooms marked this as the more expensive end of the chapter. The canned condensed version that made the name universal came later, generally dated to the 1930s.