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Six Servings of Standard Cream Soup
4 cups milk or part milk and 2 cups vegetable pulp or meat part stock or fish pulp
2 tablespoons flour
Salt, pepper, other seasonings
2 tablespoons fat
1. Make a white sauce of the liquid, flour, and fat. 2. Cook the vegetables or meat or fish until tender, drain, and mash through a sieve.
3. Combine the vegetable, meat, or fish pulp with the white sauce.
4. Season, beat with an egg-beater, and serve. A tiny portion of whipped cream or beaten egg-white may be served on top of each portion.
The standard cream soup may be made somewhat thicker for purées and bisques.
This is a formula rather than a recipe: a thin white sauce plus an equal-ish volume of sieved solids, adaptable to whatever vegetable, meat or fish is at hand. The ingredient list was set in newspaper-style columns and reads as scrambled in transcription; it resolves to 4 cups milk (or part milk, part stock), 2 cups pulp, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons fat, and seasoning.
- The ratio is the whole pointTwo tablespoons each of flour and fat to 4 cups of liquid is a very thin white sauce, about half the thickening of a standard thin sauce (a tablespoon of each per cup) and a quarter that of a medium one. That looseness is deliberate, since the vegetable pulp itself adds body. The recipe says only that it may be made "somewhat thicker" for the purées and bisques mentioned at the end; three tablespoons each is one way to do that.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inMelt the fat, stir in the flour, and let it bubble a minute or two over low heat before adding liquid. Skipping this leaves a raw-flour taste that milk does nothing to hide.
- "Fat" means butterIn a household book of this kind fat could be butter, drippings, or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Butter is the right choice for a milk-based soup; drippings suit a stock-based fish or meat version.
- The sieve, replacedMashing cooked vegetables through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth pulp. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, though a food mill gives a texture closer to the original, and for fibrous things like celery or asparagus a final pass through a sieve is still worth the trouble.
- Acid vegetables curdle milkTomato is the classic failure here. Add the hot tomato pulp to the hot white sauce off the heat, stirring, rather than the reverse, and do not let the finished soup boil.
- Beat with an egg-beaterThis would be a rotary hand beater. The recipe does not say why, but beating at this point lightens the soup and pulls the sauce and pulp together just before serving; a whisk does the same job.
- Seasoning is left entirely to youThe "other seasonings" line is the book assuming the cook knows her business. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg for spinach or cauliflower, a bay leaf infused in the milk, or a spoonful of sherry in a fish bisque all belong.
- YieldSix cups of finished soup, so six modest first-course servings of a cup each, not main-course bowls.
Cream soups of this kind are a product of the domestic-science movement, which reorganised cooking around master formulas that could be varied indefinitely rather than around individual dishes. The white sauce was the great teaching device of that school, taught in graded thicknesses for soups, sauces, creamed dishes and croquettes, and cookery textbooks from the Boston Cooking School onward drilled the proportions until they could be recited. Butterick, a pattern company that had moved into general household publishing through its magazines, was aiming squarely at the home cook trained by those textbooks or by school cookery classes. What the entry assumes is telling: that milk is cheap and reliably available, that leftover vegetables are worth converting into a course, and that a formula stated in ratios is more useful to a household than a page of separate recipes for cream of celery, cream of pea and cream of corn.