Fish Soup
Rub one cup of cold boiled fish through a sieve.
Heat one pint of milk in which has been sliced a small onion. Add the fish and thicken with one and one-half tablespoon each of flour and butter rubbed together. Add salt, pepper and paprika to taste.
F
A small, thrifty leftover soup — essentially a fish velouté built on a milk base. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the fish is cooked.
- The hinge: keep the milk below a simmerOnce the sieved fish goes in, hold the pan at a bare steam. Milk held at a rolling boil with fish in it can curdle and turn grainy, and it is hard to bring back.
- Sieving cold fishRubbing boiled fish through a sieve was the period's way of getting a smooth purée. A food processor or a few pulses with an immersion blender does the same work; press through a sieve afterward if you want it silky. One cup of flaked cooked fish is roughly 5–6 oz.
- Which fishAny mild cooked white fish — cod, haddock, hake, pollock. Oily fish such as mackerel or salmon will dominate the milk and read as fishy rather than delicate.
- Infuse, then decide about the onionThe sliced onion is there to flavour the milk, not to be eaten. Heat the milk with the onion for ten minutes off the boil, then strain it out before adding the fish unless you intend to blend everything smooth.
- The thickeningFlour and butter rubbed together cold is a beurre manie. Whisk it in a pinch at a time and give it a few minutes over low heat to cook out the raw flour taste; a pint of milk with 1½ tablespoons each stays thin -- a light soup consistency rather than a thick sauce.
- Paprika in 1911Paprika -- The paprika called for is most likely plain sweet paprika, used as much for colour against the white soup as for flavour. Smoked paprika is not what a cook of this period would have reached for and will overwhelm the dish.
- YieldA pint of milk plus a cup of fish makes two modest first-course servings. Double it for four, and consider a splash of cream at the end if you want it richer.
- The truncated lineThe original text breaks off after a stray "F", so there is no telling what, if anything, followed. Serve at once; it thickens and dulls on standing.
Milk-based fish soups of this kind sit at the frugal end of the Anglo-American soup repertoire: they exist to use up the poached cod or haddock left from yesterday's dinner, and they belong to the same family as the New England chowders and the British fish creams that fill turn-of-the-century cookery manuals. The Butterick Publishing Company came to cookbooks by way of dress patterns and The Delineator, its magazine for women, and its household books seem aimed squarely at a middle-class housekeeper who was likely managing a small staff or none at all — hence the tight, unfussy paragraph, the single cup of leftover fish and the assumption that the reader already knows how to rub flour and butter together. Paprika, worth noting, was a fashionable seasoning in American kitchens in these years, and is often said to have served as a genteel alternative to cayenne in dishes that were meant to look pale and refined.