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Onion Cream Soup
Into a pint of white or mutton stock slice three large onions and allow to simmer for an hour. Press through a sieve, replace over the fire and thicken with two tablespoons of flour rubbed to a paste with the same quantity of butter. Heat a pint of milk to the boiling point and add to the soup. Season with white pepper, salt and a tablespoon of minced parsley.
A plain white-stock onion soup thickened with roux — the method is sound, but two points in the original need attention: the onions are never browned, and the flour paste is added raw to hot liquid.
- YieldA pint of stock plus a pint of milk gives roughly a quart, or four small first-course servings. It scales up directly.
- White stock and mutton stockWhite stock is an unbrowned veal or poultry stock; the bones are blanched rather than roasted, so it stays pale. Mutton stock is now hard to buy — a light chicken stock is the closest substitute, and lamb stock will give the sheep flavour the original had in mind.
- Slice, do not brownThis is not French onion soup. The onions go straight into the stock and simmer, keeping the soup pale and sweet rather than caramelised. Three large onions to a pint of stock is a heavy proportion, and correct — the onions are the body of the soup.
- The roux is the hingeTwo tablespoons of flour rubbed to a paste with two tablespoons of butter is beurre manie, raw flour worked into softened butter. Whisk it into the simmering soup in small pieces and then cook at least two or three minutes more, or the soup will taste of paste. Cooking the flour and butter together in a pan first, then adding the liquid, gives a cleaner result.
- Adding the milkHeating the milk to boiling first, as directed, prevents the soup from cooling and thinning. Once the milk is in, keep the soup below a boil — a floury milk soup held at a rolling boil will catch on the bottom and scorch.
- Sieving"Press through a sieve" means a wooden spoon and patience against a fine sieve. A blender or food mill does the same work in a minute; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the original intended.
- SeasoningWhite pepper rather than black is deliberate, to keep dark flecks out of a pale soup. Salt only after the milk is in, since the stock's own salinity concentrates during the hour of simmering.
Onion soups thickened with flour and finished with milk belong to the large family of plain "cream" soups that filled the soup chapter of every American general-purpose cookbook around 1900 — celery, asparagus, pea, onion, all built on the same template of vegetable, stock, roux and hot milk. The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns and The Delineator magazine, and its cook book, like its sewing manuals, was aimed at a middle-class housekeeper working from a set of repeatable methods rather than individual dishes. The mutton stock offered as an alternative is a good marker of the period: mutton was far more entrenched in British kitchens than in American ones, where it was already losing ground by 1900, and its appearance here as a matter-of-course option now reads as distinctly dated.