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Cream of Potato Soup
Pare three potatoes of medium size, cut in quarters, drop them into enough salted boiling water to cover, and cook quickly. While they are boiling, place one pint of milk in a double boiler with one whole onion, and have the milk well heated by the time the potatoes are done. Drain the latter when cooked, mash them fine, and slowly add the hot milk, from which the onion has been removed. Season with one saltspoon each of celery salt, salt and white pepper or paprika, and add one tablespoon of butter and one tablespoon of flour dissolved in a little milk. Cook the soup for five minutes, pour it through a soupstrainer, return to the fire to heat, but not to boil, and serve. This soup may be made very rich by first placing two thoroughly beaten eggs in the tureen and pouring the hot liquid over them, stirring very rapidly meanwhile.
A straightforward potato veloute that needs little more than unit conversions and a note on the egg finish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of celery salt, salt and white pepper or paprika — taste before adding the last of the salt, since celery salt is already salty.
- QuantitiesThree medium potatoes and one pint (2 cups) of milk yield roughly two to three small servings. Doubling works cleanly; the soup will be thick, so hold back a little extra hot milk to thin it to the consistency you want.
- The double boilerMilk was scalded over water to keep it from scorching over a direct flame. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat does the same job in less time, watched.
- The onionThe whole peeled onion is an infusion, not an ingredient — it perfumes the milk and comes out. Halving it extracts more flavour in the same time.
- Butter and flourFlour "dissolved in a little milk" is a slurry rather than a roux. Whisk the tablespoon of flour smooth with two or three tablespoons of cold milk before it goes in, or it will lump, and give it the full five minutes so the raw starch taste cooks out.
- StrainingPushing the soup through a sieve is what separates this from mashed potato thinned with milk. A food mill or fine sieve gives a better texture than a blender, which can turn potato starch gluey.
- Do not boilThe instruction to reheat but not boil is the hinge. Boiling after the milk goes in risks curdling, and once the eggs are involved boiling will scramble them.
- The egg enrichmentTwo beaten eggs in the warmed tureen, with hot soup poured over and stirred hard, is a classic liaison. The eggs are lightly cooked by residual heat rather than brought to a safe temperature, so treat it as you would a homemade custard sauce or aioli; those avoiding undercooked egg should leave it out, and the soup is complete without it.
Cream soups of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century American cooking-school tradition, where a scalded-milk base thickened with butter and flour was taught as a single template and varied by whatever vegetable was to hand — potato, celery, corn, asparagus. The measured saltspoons, the double boiler, the soup strainer and the printed reminder not to let the milk boil are all marks of that systematic domestic instruction. The egg liaison poured into a heated tureen is older than the flour thickening and points back to French practice, where beaten eggs finish a potage off the heat; that it is offered here as an optional way to make the soup "very rich" suggests it was regarded as company fare rather than everyday supper.