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Cream of Celery Soup
6 Stalks Celery 1 Pint Water 2 Teaspoons Cornstarch 1/2 Can Tomatoes 1 Pint Milk 1 Tablespoon Butter Salt and Pepper to Taste Cook the celery in the water till soft, mash and strain. Make a sauce of the cornstarch, butter and milk. Add the celery and the tomatoes, heated, with a pinch of soda, and strained. Season.
Serve in bouillon cups, with a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
A simple two-part soup: a celery purée and a thin cornstarch-milk sauce, joined at the last minute with tomato. The hinge is the tomato, which will curdle the milk unless it is handled carefully.
- Why the pinch of sodaThe baking soda neutralises enough of the tomato's acid to keep the milk from curdling when the two meet. Use no more than a scant 1/8 teaspoon for this quantity; too much gives a soapy, flat taste and a dull colour. Combining the two slowly, while both are hot, also helps.
- "6 stalks celery"Period usage varies: a "stalk" can mean a single rib or a whole head. Six whole heads would be out of proportion to a pint of water, so read this as six ribs with their leaves; if your celery is slender, use eight.
- Half a can of tomatoesCan sizes were not yet standardised, and tomatoes were packed in more than one size, so the quantity is approximate: read it as somewhere between 1 and 2 cups. Use canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice and push them through a sieve as directed.
- The cornstarch sauceTwo teaspoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a very light body, barely thicker than cream. Slake the cornstarch in a little cold milk first, then stir it into the rest with the butter and cook two or three minutes at a bare simmer to lose the raw starch taste.
- StrainingBoiled celery keeps its strings no matter how soft it gets. Mash and press it through a fine sieve or food mill, or purée in a blender and then sieve; the cooking water goes through with it and is part of the soup.
- Do not boil after combiningOnce tomato and milk are together, hold the soup just below a simmer. A hard boil will break it even with the soda, and the thin starch sauce offers little protection.
- Yield and servingSomething over a quart, which is five or six bouillon cups as the recipe intends, or three ordinary soup bowls. The whipped cream should be unsweetened and softly whipped so it melts into the surface.
Cream soups of this kind were a fixture of American home cookery by the late nineteenth century, when canned tomatoes and cheap cornstarch put a smooth, pale soup within reach of a household with no stockpot going. The tomato-and-milk combination is the same problem that produced cream of tomato soup, and a pinch of soda is a common nineteenth-century answer to it, appearing in cookbook after cookbook well before the chemistry was explained in print. The style is characteristic of books aimed at new housekeepers: recipes built on pantry staples and a single vegetable, served in bouillon cups with a spoonful of whipped cream so that a cheap first course could look like a course from a hotel menu.