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Swiss Potato Soup
4 small potatoes 1 large flat white turnip 3 cups boiling water 1 quart scalded milk 1/2 onion 4 tablespoons butter 1/3 cup flour 1½ teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Wash, pare, and cut potatoes in halves. Wash, pare, and cut turnips in one-quarter inch slices. Parboil together ten minutes, drain, add onion cut in slices, and three cups boiling water. Cook until vegetables are soft; drain, reserving the water to add to vegetables after rubbing them through a sieve. Add milk, reheat, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper.
A plain cream-of-vegetable soup from the stockless chapter — potato and turnip pushed through a sieve, thinned with scalded milk, thickened with a butter-flour roux. Nothing is difficult; the details below are where the old wording is likely to trip you.
- Parboil, then discardThe first ten minutes of boiling water is thrown away and replaced with three cups of fresh boiling water. The recipe gives no reason; the usual explanation for parboiling turnip is to temper its sharpness.
- Save the second cooking waterThe vegetables are drained again, but this time the liquid goes back in. Reserve what remains of the three cups and add it to the vegetables after sieving; without it the purée is too stiff.
- "Rub through a sieve"A food mill or a ricer gives the intended texture. A blender or immersion blender will make potato gluey; if you use one, pulse briefly and stop.
- Scalded milkHeated to just below boiling, around 180F, until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. In the pre-pasteurization era this was partly a keeping measure; today it simply keeps the soup from cooling as you combine and helps the roux disperse smoothly.
- The rouxCook 4 tablespoons butter with 1/3 cup flour for two or three minutes over low heat before whisking it into the hot soup, then simmer several minutes more. Undercooked flour is the usual fault in these bound soups.
- One large flat white turnipA flat-rooted white turnip of the old market type, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb. Any white turnip works; a rutabaga does not — it is sweeter and much stronger, and will dominate.
- Yield and finishNo yield is given; a quart of milk plus the reserved cooking water and the purée will come to something nearer seven cups. It is deliberately pale and mild.
This is one of the most practical kinds of recipe for households that did not always have a stockpot going and could not always afford meat for one. The formula is consistent: a vegetable cooked soft, sieved, extended with milk, and bound with butter and flour — essentially a thin béchamel carrying a purée, the same logic behind the cream soups that fill American cookbooks for the next fifty years. The "Swiss" label here appears to be decorative rather than geographic; no Swiss original is documented for this one. What is genuine is the pairing: potato with turnip, since both roots kept for months in a cool dark place and needed only milk and butter to become dinner.