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Potato Soup
1½ teaspoons salt ¼ teaspoon celery salt ⅛ teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Cook potatoes in boiling salted water; when soft, rub through a strainer. There should be two cups. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk slowly to potatoes. Melt half the butter, add dry ingredients, stir until well mixed, then stir into hot soup; boil one minute, strain, add remaining butter, and sprinkle with parsley.
This is one of the Boston Cooking School's white-sauce soups: a purée of potato loosened with scalded milk and bound with a butter-and-flour roux. The ingredient list as printed here has come through badly, so work from the method and from the one measurement that is unambiguous.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe celery salt reads a quarter teaspoon, as the printed page has it. The quantities for potatoes, milk, butter and flour are missing from the list altogether; cream soups of this type run to roughly a quart of milk against two cups of potato pulp, thickened with about two tablespoons each of butter and flour.
- Two cups of pulp is the real measureThe line "There should be two cups" is the anchor of the whole recipe. Boil and sieve enough potatoes to reach it — three medium russets, near enough — and scale the milk to it.
- Rub through a strainer, or riceA food mill or a potato ricer does the job the tammy sieve once did. A food processor or blender will turn the starch gluey and give you paste rather than soup.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk to just below a simmer with the onion slices in it, so the surface shivers and steam rises; do not let it boil. The onion is there for perfume only and comes straight out.
- "Add dry ingredients" means the flourThe butter and flour are cooked together off the boil until smooth — the seasonings go in with them — then whisked into the hot soup. Add it in a stream while stirring or it will set in lumps.
- Boil one minute, and mean itThat minute is what cooks the raw taste out of the flour and lets it thicken fully. Prolonged boiling can break the potato starch down and thin the soup.
- The final strainingStraining after thickening is what gives the smooth texture the book is after. Skip it and you have a rustic potato soup; it will taste the same but will not have that texture.
- Butter in two stagesHalf the butter goes into the roux, half is stirred in off the heat at the end for gloss and flavour. Do not let it boil again once the finishing butter is in.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quart of milk, about a quart and a half of finished soup, four generous first-course servings. The page as printed states no yield.
The chapter heading — "Soups Without Stock" — is the point of the recipe. Nineteenth-century soup cookery assumed a stockpot, and a stockpot assumed bones, time and a servant to skim it. Fannie Farmer's book, drawn from the teaching kitchen of the Boston Cooking School, was written for households where neither was guaranteed, and its cream soups build flavour instead from milk scalded with aromatics and thickened with a roux, on the model of a béchamel. Nearly every vegetable in the book gets the same treatment: cook, sieve, thin with milk, bind, strain. Potato is the plainest of them, and it demonstrates the whole method with an ingredient every kitchen already had. The insistence on an exact yield of pulp — "There should be two cups" — is Farmer's signature, and her name is generally attached to the rise of level, standardised measurement in American home cooking.