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Potato Cream Soup
Boil some veal bones in three quarts of water until it is reduced to two quarts, first placing in with the veal bones, a knuckle of ham or a slice of pickled pork and a bunch of vegetables. Then chop an onion very fine and put it in the soup; peel and boil two large potatoes, and when thoroughly cooked, drain and mash them, mixing in a little at a time, a breakfast cupful of cream or milk. Mix in the potato cream with the soup, and strain it through a colander into a soup tureen, seasoning it with salt, pepper and a tablespoonful of finely-chopped parsley and serve.
A thin, old-style cream soup built on a real veal stock rather than on flour. Almost all the work is in the broth; the potato is a thickener as much as a flavour.
- The stock is the dishThree quarts of water reduced to two over veal bones means roughly three to four hours at a bare simmer, skimmed. Nothing later in the recipe rescues a weak broth, so brown or blanch the bones as you prefer but do not shorten the time.
- "A bunch of vegetables"This is the standard nineteenth-century shorthand for a bundle of aromatics: a carrot, a stick of celery, a leek or onion and a few stalks of parsley and thyme, tied together so they can be lifted out. Roughly the same as a mirepoix plus bouquet garni.
- Knuckle of ham or pickled porkBoth would have been salty. A modern smoked ham hock is generally milder; pickled pork is brine-cured pork, usually belly or shoulder, and is now easiest to find in Southern and Creole markets. Either way, taste before adding any salt at the end.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Use one cup of cream or whole milk and add more only if the soup is thicker than you want.
- Potato choice and handlingUse floury potatoes -- russets or a similar baking variety -- and mash them by hand or through a ricer while hot, beating the cream in gradually. A blender or food processor ruptures the starch cells and turns the soup gluey.
- The raw onionChopped onion dropped into the finished stock needs fifteen to twenty minutes of simmering to lose its rawness. Add it before the potato cream, not after, or it will still be sharp when you strain.
- StrainingA colander is coarse by design here: it holds back bones and aromatics but lets the potato through, leaving a soup with some body rather than a velvet puree. Finely chopped onion will likely pass through with it. If you want it smoother, pass it through a fine sieve instead.
- YieldSomething over two quarts finished, which serves six to eight as a first course. Reheat gently once the cream is in; a hard boil will split it.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the 1896 book he put his name to reads like a compendium of the hotel's working repertoire, including the plain soups that filled out a long menu between the oysters and the roast. Potato cream soup sits at the humble end of that list: no roux, no egg liaison, just good stock, potato and a cup of cream. The veal-bone base with a ham knuckle is the ordinary white stock of the era's professional kitchen, and its presence here is a reminder that hotel cookery of the 1890s is generally thought to have assumed a stockpot always at the back of the range -- the reason a recipe this short could stand as a complete instruction to a cook.