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Pepper (Cups boiling water tablespoons)
2 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons butter Parboil celery in water ten minutes; drain, add stock, cook until celery is soft, and rub through sieve. Scald onion in milk, remove onion, add milk to stock, bind, add cream, and season with salt and pepper. 4 cups White Stock II or III 2 quarts spinach 3 cups boiling water 2 cups milk
The text as printed is a scrambled fragment: the method belongs to a cream of celery soup, while the trailing lines (spinach, three cups boiling water) have drifted in from the neighbouring purée recipe. The quantities that matter most — how much celery, how much flour for the binding, how much cream — are missing, so treat this as a method to follow rather than a formula to measure.
- What is actually missingNo quantity of celery is given, and neither the flour nor the cream is quantified — indeed no flour is listed at all. For a soup on this scale (4 cups stock, 2 cups milk) something like a bunch of celery, roughly 4 cups sliced, would be in the right range; the 2 tablespoons butter with an equal measure of flour would make a standard binding.
- "Bind" means a rouxBinding a soup of this type generally means cooking the butter with an equal measure of flour and then working in the hot liquid and simmering it out. No flour is listed in this fragment, so the 2 tablespoons butter is most likely meant for that binding rather than for finishing.
- White Stock II or IIIBoston Cooking-School white stock is a mild veal or veal-and-chicken stock. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- Parboiling the celeryTen minutes in water, then drained, tempers the strong, coarse flavour of older celery. Modern celery is milder, and skipping the step gives a fresher flavour at the cost of a slightly greener one.
- Scalding the onion in milkA whole peeled onion is heated in the milk just to the point of steaming, then lifted out, leaving a faint sweetness behind. It is a period technique for flavouring without pieces; do not let the milk boil against the pan bottom.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to purée a soup at the time. A blender does it faster, but celery is stringy enough that passing the purée through a fine sieve afterwards still improves the texture.
- Season at the endSalt and pepper go in after the cream, as the original says. Stock reduces and milk mutes salt, so judging it early almost always leaves the soup flat.
- YieldRoughly six cups finished soup, or four to six first-course servings.
Cream soups of this type — stock, scalded milk, a butter-and-flour binding, a purée of one vegetable — form a whole family of recipes in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and the book teaches them as variations on a single method rather than as unrelated dishes. That was the pedagogical point of the Boston Cooking School: learn the proportion, then swap the vegetable. Celery was a fashionable ingredient in late nineteenth-century America, sold in tall glass celery vases at the table and prized as much for its crispness as its flavour, so it earned both a raw place at dinner and a cooked one in the soup course. The scrambled state of this particular page, with a spinach soup's ingredients bleeding into a celery soup's method, is of uncertain origin, and the fragment itself gives no indication of which edition it was taken from.