Puree
(Dried Legumes) 1 Pint Dried Legumes 1 Onion 1/2 Head Celery A Ham Bone if at hand 3 Tablespoons Cornstarch Salt and Pepper 11/2 Cups Milk Soak the legumes over night in cold water, wash, drain, and simmer in three pints of water, stirring often with a wooden spoon and adding more water as evaporation necessitates. If a ham bone be used, put on to cook at the same time as the legumes. When the vegetables are becoming tender, sauté the onion and celery, cut fine, in a little dripping, and add to the soup; when all are tender pass through a sieve, reheat, and stir in the butter and cornstarch creamed together and add the milk to the soup.
A workmanlike dried-pea or bean soup thickened twice — once by sieving the legumes themselves, once with a cornstarch roux. The recipe assumes you know how to judge a pot of beans by eye, and it leaves one ingredient unquantified.
- Missing butter quantityButter is called for in the method but never in the ingredient list. Creamed with 3 tablespoons cornstarch, 3 tablespoons butter gives a workable paste; the original leaves this genuinely open.
- A pint of dried legumesDry measure, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz of split peas, lentils, navy or lima beans. Split peas and lentils need no overnight soak and will collapse in 45 minutes to an hour; whole beans want the full soak and 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
- Three pints of waterSix cups to start, topped up as it reduces. Expect to add another cup or two with whole beans. The finished purée should coat a spoon before the milk goes in, since the milk thins it noticeably.
- DrippingSaved bacon or roast fat. Butter or oil does the same job for the onion and celery; the dripping mainly adds a savory depth that the ham bone is also supplying.
- Half a head of celeryCelery heads were likely smaller than a modern bunch, so three or four stalks with their leaves is probably closer to the mark than half a modern head.
- Passing through a sieveThe point is to remove skins, which a blender only chops finer. Blend first if you like, then push through a medium sieve; a food mill does both at once.
- The hinge: add the milk off the boilStir the butter-cornstarch paste into the simmering purée and cook a minute or two until it loses its raw starch taste, then add the milk and bring back only to steaming. Hard boiling after the milk goes in curdles it, especially with a salty ham bone in the pot.
- Salt lastA ham bone can carry the whole seasoning. Taste after the bone comes out and before the milk goes in.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, six to eight servings as a first course.
"Purée" in a book of this vintage means much what the French word suggests: a soup whose body comes from the vegetable itself, sieved, rather than from stock or cream alone. Household cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on dried legumes because they were cheap, kept well in the pantry, and could be stretched with milk and a bone left from Sunday's ham — the sort of economy a new housekeeper was expected to learn first. The unspecified "legumes" reads as a template rather than an oversight: the same method served split peas, lentils, navy beans or dried limas. The butter-and-cornstarch paste stirred in at the end stands in for a flour roux, cornstarch having been promoted in American kitchens from the mid-1800s onward as a thickener.