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CREAM OF SPINACH SOUP (Blend one tablespoon of butter)
Blend one tablespoon of butter with one of flour and add slowly two cups of cold milk. Stir until all is smooth and creamy. Add two cups of spinach pulp. Serve with whipped cream in each plate.
A terse white-sauce soup that assumes you already have cooked spinach on hand and know to season it. Both assumptions need filling in.
- Spinach pulpThis means spinach boiled or steamed until tender, squeezed dry, and pressed through a sieve or now simply pureed. Two cups of pulp takes roughly 2 to 2½ lb of fresh spinach, or two 10-oz packages of frozen leaf spinach, thawed and wrung out hard.
- The roux is the hingeOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to two cups of milk gives a very thin sauce, which is the point, but the flour must cook. Let the butter and flour bubble together a minute without colouring, then add the milk gradually and bring the sauce to a simmer for two or three minutes before the spinach goes in, or the soup tastes of raw paste.
- Add the spinach off the boilStir the pulp in and heat it through only. Prolonged boiling turns bright green spinach a drab olive and pushes out a metallic, overcooked flavour.
- Seasoning, which the original omitsSalt, white pepper and a small grating of nutmeg are wanted; nutmeg is a long-standing pairing with spinach and cream, though the recipe as printed says nothing about seasoning at all. A little onion or celery simmered in the milk and strained out also helps.
- TextureSieved spinach still leaves fibre. If you want it smooth, blend the finished soup and pass it through a fine strainer; thin with a little more milk or light stock if it tightens.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, whipped to soft peaks, spooned into each plate at the table rather than stirred in. The recipe specifies a plate rather than a cup or bowl, so a shallow soup plate suits the garnish.
- YieldAbout one quart, or four modest first-course servings.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) was issued by the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for its dress patterns and sewing guides, and its soup chapter reflects the American middle-class table of the day, where a cream soup commonly opened dinner. Recipes of this kind sit in the broad Anglo-American cream-soup tradition drawn from the French potage: a butter-and-flour liaison, milk instead of stock, and a sieved vegetable puree for body and colour. A spoonful of whipped cream in each plate, rather than croutons or a swirl stirred through, was a familiar finish for cream soups in this period. The wording here is compressed to the point of being telegraphic, assuming a reader who already knew how to season a white sauce and needed only the proportions.