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Cream of Cucumber Soup
Three cups of peeled cucumbers cut in small pieces. Parboil for ten minutes, drain and add them to four cups of chicken stock in which there is a slice of onion. Cook until soft, rub through a sieve, add one-fourth of a cup of flour and butter rubbed together, and salt and pepper to taste. Strain and serve.
A short, plain purée that relies on chicken stock for body and, despite the name, contains no cream at all. The one thing to get right is the flour-and-butter thickening at the end.
- The beurre manié"One-fourth of a cup of flour and butter rubbed together" most likely means a quarter cup of the finished paste, i.e. roughly 2 tablespoons each of soft butter and flour kneaded smooth, though the wording could also be read as a quarter cup of flour with butter to match. Whisk it into the hot soup in small pieces and simmer at least 3-4 minutes afterwards, or the soup tastes of raw flour.
- Why parboilThe recipe does not say; ten minutes in boiling water would soften the cucumber and probably take the edge off the bitterness older varieties could carry. Modern seedless or English cucumbers are milder; a shorter blanch, or none, still works, but the cooking-until-soft stage is not optional.
- Seeds and skinPeel as directed, and it is worth scraping out the seeds of large cucumbers, which can be bitter, even though the sieve will hold most of them back.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" is the 1911 method. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds; the final straining step then catches any remaining skin or seed fragments.
- The nameNo cream appears in the ingredients; "cream of" here describes the consistency. A half cup of cream or milk stirred in at the end, off the boil, is consistent with the period and improves it.
- SeasoningCucumber and flour are both bland. Be generous with salt and white pepper, and a squeeze of lemon or a little dill at the end sharpens it noticeably.
- YieldFour cups of stock plus the cucumber purée gives roughly five to six cups of finished soup, enough for four to six first-course servings. The recipe does not specify a serving temperature; served cold it will want thinning slightly, as the flour sets on cooling.
Cucumber soups belong to a long line of European vegetable purées thickened with flour and butter — the technique here is a beurre manié, the cold paste of butter and flour stirred into a finished liquid, distinct from a roux cooked at the start. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick. Some American household manuals of the period grouped soups in a graded series: clear stocks, then bisques and "cream of" purées built on stock. Naming a soup "cream of" for its texture rather than its contents does occur in this period, though many such soups did contain cream. Parboiling and sieving may reflect the tougher, more bitter cucumber varieties then common.