Farina Soup
4 cups White Stock III. 1/4 cup farina. 2 cups scalded milk. 1 cup cream Few gratings of nutmeg Salt and pepper Heat stock to boiling-point, add farina, and boil fifteen minutes; then add milk, cream, and seasonings.
Only the tail of this recipe survives in legible form, so treat what follows as guidance on the technique rather than a full set of quantities.
- What farina isFarina is finely milled wheat middlings, sold today as Cream of Wheat or as unflavoured farina cereal. Semolina behaves similarly but is coarser and needs a longer simmer.
- Add it in a streamSprinkle or rain the farina into boiling stock while whisking. Dumped in at once it seizes into lumps that will not disperse, and no amount of later beating fixes them.
- Fifteen minutes is correctFifteen minutes -- the recipe boils the farina a full fifteen minutes before the dairy goes in. Modern packaged farina softens far faster than that, so treat the long boil as the book's own preference rather than a requirement.
- Dairy goes in off the boilThe milk and cream are added at the end for a reason. Once the dairy is in, keep the pot below a simmer; a rolling boil in a starch-thickened, cream-enriched soup scorches on the bottom and can curdle.
- ProportionsThe surviving text gives only 1 cup of cream; the stock, farina and milk quantities are lost. If you are reconstructing it, a quart of stock with a few tablespoons of farina is a plausible starting point, but it is a guess and not the book's figure. The soup thickens as it stands, so thin with hot stock at service.
- Seasoning lastSalt after the starch has cooked and the dairy is in, since the soup reduces and concentrates during the boil. Grate the nutmeg fresh; the pre-ground jar tastes of dust in a plain white soup.
- YieldThe surviving text gives no yield, and with the stock quantity missing none can be calculated.
Farina soups belong to a large family of nineteenth-century "invalid" and light first-course dishes, in which a fine cereal was cooked in broth and softened with cream to make something nourishing but easy to swallow. Such recipes differ chiefly in the grain used, and the pattern reflects a period when a household cook was expected to produce food for the sickroom as routinely as for the dining table. Farina itself was a commercial product of the roller mills that transformed American flour milling in the 1870s and 1880s.