Creole Soup
3 tablespoons green pepper
1 pint tomatoes, fresh or chopped canned
2 tablespoons onion chopped
Salt and pepper
¼ cup savory fat
2 tablespoons grated horse- 2 tablespoons flour radish
1 quart stock
1 teaspoon vinegar
Cook chopped green pepper and chopped onion in savory fat for five minutes. Add flour, stock, tomatoes, and simmer fifteen minutes. Rub through sieve and season with salt and pepper. CREHOW SOUP!!
Just before serving add grated horseradish and vinegar. HOW TO PREVENT SKIN ON CREAM SOUPS If a cream soup or a milk soup is beaten just before serving, the froth protects it against skin formation.
If a small portion of whipped cream or beaten egg-white is served on top of each portion of cream soup, it aids in preventing the skin formation as well as adds to the delicacy and attractiveness of the dish.
A tomato-and-pepper purée finished with raw horseradish and vinegar — the sharp finish is the whole point of the dish, and it goes in off the heat.
- The hinge: horseradish goes in lastGrated horseradish loses much of its pungency on contact with hot liquid, which is why the recipe holds it back and stirs it in with the vinegar just before serving.
- The ingredient list, sorted outThe quantities run in two columns and read as: 3 tablespoons chopped green pepper, 2 tablespoons chopped onion, ¼ cup savory fat, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 quart stock, 1 pint tomatoes (fresh or canned), salt and pepper, 2 tablespoons grated horseradish, 1 teaspoon vinegar.
- "Savory fat"Rendered drippings kept from roasting — bacon, beef or poultry fat. Butter works; use 4 tablespoons, which with 2 tablespoons flour gives a fat-heavy roux that thins out once the quart of stock goes in.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root is what is meant. Bottled prepared horseradish is already cut with vinegar, so if you use it, start with the same 2 tablespoons, drained, and cut the added vinegar back to a few drops, tasting as you go.
- TomatoesA pint is 2 cups; a standard 14–15 oz can is close enough. Taste before adding the vinegar.
- Sieving"Rub through a sieve" was the era's purée step. A stick blender does it faster, though passing the blended soup through a fine strainer afterward still catches pepper and tomato skins.
- YieldAbout six cups of soup, or four to six servings as a first course.
- The note on skinThe paragraph on preventing skin belongs to milk- and cream-based soups generally, not to this one — this soup is stock-based and will not skin over.
Butterick's "Creole" here means what it usually meant in Northern cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s: tomato, green pepper and onion, the trio that stood in for New Orleans in kitchens far from it. Genuine Creole cooking of the period leaned on roux, stock and long-simmered gravies, while the pepper-and-tomato shorthand served as the signature in magazine recipes. The horseradish-and-vinegar finish is not a Louisiana touch; it does the same work that hot sauce or a squeeze of lemon does in a modern bowl, waking a purée that would otherwise be flat. Recipes built on saved drippings — "savory fat" — were standard in this book, which came out of a magazine publisher advising households where nothing renderable was thrown away.