White Stock
III, cook slowly thirty minutes, and strain.
Dilute three tablespoons flour with enough cold water to pour easily, add to soup, and bring to boiling-point. Then add one cup cream, and one tablespoon chopped green peppers, or onefourth cup grated cheese. Season with salt and pepper.
Chestnut Purée 4 cups White Stock II or III 2 cups French chestnuts, boiled and mashed 1 slice onion ¼ teaspoon celery salt 2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour
This page is a fragment: it opens mid-instruction for one cream soup built on white stock and ends with the ingredient list for a chestnut purée whose method was printed on the following page. Both follow the standard Farmer formula for a cream soup, so the gaps are easy to bridge.
- What "White Stock II or III" meansFarmer numbers her stocks. White stock is made from veal knuckle and/or fowl, simmered without browning the meat or bones first, so it stays pale and mild. Any unsalted light chicken or veal stock stands in; avoid a dark roasted stock, which defeats the point.
- The thickening ratioThree tablespoons flour slaked in cold water thickens only lightly, to little more than the body of cream; the page does not say how much stock the first soup starts from, as the opening of that recipe is missing. The chestnut purée instead lists a quarter cup butter to a quarter cup flour, a proper white roux, presumably because the mashed chestnuts and scalded milk need more body to stay suspended.
- Slaking the flourFlour mixed with cold water and stirred into hot stock must be brought fully to a boil and held a minute or two, or the soup tastes of raw paste. Add it in a thin stream while whisking.
- Cream added lastThe cup of cream goes in after the flour has cooked out, and the soup should not boil hard afterward. With modern cream this is less about curdling than about keeping the flavor fresh.
- French chestnutsThese are marrons, the large single-kernel sweet chestnuts. Two cups boiled and mashed will take somewhere in the region of a pound to a pound and a half in the shell. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are the practical substitute; canned chestnut purée is often sweetened, so check.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge. Scalding was commonly explained as a guard against souring and against enzyme and bacterial activity in unpasteurized milk; today it simply keeps the soup from cooling when combined and helps the roux take it smoothly.
- Celery saltA quarter teaspoon of celery salt is the only seasoning named in the chestnut purée's ingredient list, so hold back on plain salt until the soup is assembled and tasted.
- Finishing the puréeThe method is not printed here. The standard pattern in this book would be to cook the chestnuts in the stock with the onion slice, press the mixture through a sieve, then combine it with the milk thickened by the butter-and-flour roux. A blender does much the same job in seconds, but a sieve afterward still catches the skins.
White stock is the pale half of the classical stock pair that nineteenth-century American cookery inherited from French practice: brown stock from beef and roasted bones for consommés and sauces, white stock from veal knuckle or fowl, simmered without coloring, for cream soups and velouté-style sauces. Fannie Farmer's stocks are numbered, and a single base could be turned out as a dozen different soups by varying the purée and the garnish. The chestnut soup is a case in point. Two kinds of chestnut were available: the native American chestnut, then still standing in New England woods before the blight of the early 1900s took it, and imported European marrons, the "French chestnuts" specified here.