Spring Soup
1/2 cup stale baker's bread. 1 quart White Stock I or II 1 large onion thinly sliced 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup stale baker's bread 1 cup milk 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons flour Salt and pepper Cook onion fifteen minutes in one tablespoon butter; add to stock, with bread broken in pieces. Simmer one hour; rub through sieve. Add milk, and bind with remaining butter and flour cooked together; add cream, and season.
A white onion purée thickened twice over — first with stale bread, then with a butter-and-flour roux. It is simpler than the ingredient list suggests, and the whole character of it depends on keeping the onion pale.
- White Stock I or IIIn this book those are the light stocks made without browning. A quart of low-sodium chicken stock stands in acceptably; avoid anything dark or heavily herbed, since the point is a pale, neutral base.
- Do not let the onion colourFifteen minutes in a tablespoon of butter means sweating over low heat until translucent and soft. Any browning turns the finished soup beige and gives it a caramelised sweetness the recipe does not want.
- Stale baker's breadA half cup of torn crumb from a plain white loaf, a day or two old. Sandwich bread with added sugar and dough conditioners will dissolve to paste and taste of itself; a lean bakery loaf or baguette is closer to the original.
- Rub through a sieveThis is the older way of saying purée. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, though passing the blended soup through a fine sieve afterwards is still worth the minute it takes for the texture.
- Binding with butter and flourThe remaining 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour are cooked together into a pale roux, then whisked into the hot soup. Cook the roux a minute or two without colour and let the soup simmer briefly afterwards so the flour taste cooks out.
- Add the cream off the boilThe cream goes in last, and the soup should be brought back only to steaming. A hard boil after the dairy is in risks curdling and dulls the flavour.
- YieldFive to six cups once the milk and cream are in, depending on how much reduces during the hour's simmer — three or four servings.
Thickening a soup with stale bread is much older than thickening it with flour, and this recipe catches both methods in the same pot: a bread panade doing the body, a roux doing the finish. The name is loose — nothing in it is seasonal. Books of this school devote many pages to this sort of cream soup, built on a standard white stock the household was expected to keep on hand, which is why the recipe opens with a cross-reference rather than a method.