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Squash Soup
¾ cup cooked squash 1 quart milk 1 slice onion 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper ¼ teaspoon celery salt Rub squash through a sieve before measuring. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to squash; season, and bind.
A cream soup in the Boston Cooking School's standard pattern: a thin white sauce carrying a vegetable purée. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the squash is cooked.
- "Bind" is the whole methodMelt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 3 tablespoons flour, cook a minute without colouring, then whisk in the hot seasoned milk-and-squash mixture and cook until it thickens. That roux is the only thickener; the squash is there for flavour and colour, not body.
- The squash quantity looks thinA quarter cup of purée to a full quart of milk gives a very pale soup. Other cream soups built on this pattern often carry considerably more vegetable pulp per quart of milk, and the flavour is better at that ratio. Treat ¼ cup as a floor, not a target.
- "14 teaspoon" is a printing artefactThe original almost certainly read ¼ teaspoon of celery salt. Add it a little at a time and taste, remembering it is contributing salt as well as flavour alongside the teaspoon of plain salt.
- Which squashCooked winter squash is meant — Hubbard was the New England default when this was written. Butternut or kabocha, steamed or baked and drained well, behaves the same. Excess water in the purée will thin the finished soup.
- Rub through a sieve before measuringThis matters for consistency: sieved purée packs differently from mashed. A food mill or fine strainer does it faster than the wire sieve and wooden spoon assumed here.
- Scalding the milkBring it to about 180F, just as bubbles form at the edge, with the onion slice in it. Do not boil, and lift the onion out before it becomes the dominant flavour — five minutes of steeping is plenty.
- YieldA quart of milk makes four generous cups of soup, so four servings as a first course. It reheats gently but will not hold well once thickened; whisk over low heat if it stands.
Fannie Farmer's "Soups Without Stock" chapter is a small monument to household economy: many of these soups are a white sauce with a vegetable folded in, so a cook who mastered the roux could produce a dozen different first courses without keeping a stockpot going. Squash belonged squarely to that logic in New England, where hard-shelled winter varieties like the Hubbard kept in a cool cellar from autumn well into spring and turned up baked, in pies, and here in a cream soup. The Hubbard is generally traced to Marblehead, Massachusetts, and was widely distributed by the seedsman James J. H. Gregory in the mid-nineteenth century, which is why it reads as the assumed squash in Boston cookbooks of this period. The instruction to "bind" without further explanation tells you something about the book's audience — Farmer expected the white sauce to be reflex.