Cucumber Soup
3 large cucumbers 1 slice onion 2 tablespoons butter 2 blades mace 3 tablespoons flour 3 cups White Stock III 1/2 cup cream Yolks 2 eggs 1 cup milk Salt and pepper Peel cucumbers, slice, and remove seeds. Cook in butter ten minutes; then add flour and stock. Scald milk with onion and mace. Combine mixtures and rub through a sieve. Reheat to boiling-point and add cream and egg yolks. Season with salt and pepper. ½ cup almonds 6 bitter almonds
A classic velouté-style cream soup: cucumbers softened in butter, thickened with a roux, enriched with cream and yolks. Two details in the printed text need attention before you start.
- The stray last line"½ cup almonds 6 bitter almonds" is not part of this soup — it is the head of the next recipe's ingredient list, spilled over in the typesetting. Ignore it. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide, and they are not legally sold for food in the US in any case.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inBring the sieved soup to boiling point first, then pull it off the heat, temper a ladleful into the yolks beaten with the cream, and stir that back in. Return it to gentle heat only until it thickens slightly — at a simmer the yolks curdle and no amount of whisking recovers it.
- White Stock IIIFarmer's white stock is an unbrowned, lightly seasoned stock, generally built on veal and/or fowl rather than browned bones. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark, roasted, or heavily herbed, which will overwhelm the cucumber.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as "blades." Blade-to-ground conversions vary, so treat it by taste: a small pinch of ground mace, or of grated nutmeg, steeped in the scalded milk. Strain the blades out with the onion when you sieve.
- CucumbersThree large cucumbers come to roughly 2 lb. Peel and seed them as directed — the seeds go watery in a purée. English or Persian cucumbers work and need only a quick scrape of the seed channel.
- Rubbing through a sieveAn immersion blender does the work in seconds, but still pass the soup through a fine strainer afterward; onion strings and mace fibres survive blending and spoil the texture.
- Yield and servingAbout 5 cups, serving four as a first course. It is meant hot, though chilled it becomes a passable summer soup — chilled, it will want noticeably more salt and a squeeze of lemon.
Cucumber soup belongs to the family of white cream soups — Farmer's chapter is full of them — that defined polite American first courses at the turn of the twentieth century, when a meal's opening was expected to be pale, smooth, and mild rather than assertive. The technique is straight out of the French repertoire the Boston Cooking School taught in simplified form: a roux, a white stock, and a liaison of egg yolks and cream added off the heat. Cucumbers were abundant and cheap in the summer kitchen garden, and cooking and sieving them turned a watery vegetable into something that could be served in a soup plate to guests. The reference to "White Stock III" reflects the book's habit of numbering successive versions of a foundation recipe so that later recipes can point back to one of them.