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Potato Soup
Boil in their skins about a dozen medium-sized potatoes, and when done, peel and pass them through a fine sieve. Put a lump of butter about the size of an egg in a saucepan, let it melt, and add a tablespoonful of arrowroot, and stir over the fire until well browned; then add the potatoes with as much well flavored stock as will be required for the soup; boil all together. When done, pour the soup into a soup tureen, and serve while hot with a plate of sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
A plain hotel-kitchen soup that depends almost entirely on the quality of the stock, since nothing else in it carries flavor. A few of Oscar's measures need translating.
- Butter "the size of an egg"About 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks used egg, walnut and hazelnut as standard volume markers.
- ArrowrootStill sold, usually as arrowroot starch or flour. It is used here as a thickener browned in fat, in the manner of a roux; cornstarch behaves similarly but scorches faster, and plain flour gives a heavier, less glossy body.
- Do not brown it hardThe instruction to stir "until well browned" is the weak point: arrowroot loses most of its thickening power with prolonged heat, and browning it dark will leave the soup thin. Cook it only until it smells toasty and turns a light tan, a minute or two.
- Quantity of stockUnspecified. A dozen medium potatoes is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb of purée, which wants about 2 to 2 1/2 quarts of stock for a soup that coats a spoon without being pasty. Add it gradually and stop when the consistency suits you.
- Boiling in the skins mattersPotatoes cooked in their jackets absorb far less water, so the purée is drier and the finished soup less watery. Peel them while still hot, before the flesh sets.
- Sieve, not blenderPass the potatoes through a fine sieve, food mill or ricer. A blender or food processor ruptures the starch cells and turns cooked potato gluey within seconds.
- ReheatingBring the finished soup barely to a simmer rather than a hard boil, and stir; potato purée settles and catches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- SippetsNarrow fingers or small triangles of toast, cut for dipping. The recipe offers croutons of fried bread as the richer alternative, served the same way, on a plate alongside.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 servings as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and the recipes he collected under his name sit oddly between grand-hotel cookery and the plain domestic dishes his readers were more likely to cook. Potato soup is squarely in the second camp: what raises it to hotel standard is not technique but the "well flavored stock" the recipe assumes a competent kitchen keeps on hand. The arrowroot is a period marker too. It was a fashionable fine thickener of the nineteenth century, prized for producing a clear, glossy liaison without the floury taste of a wheat roux, and it appears in American and English cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s, though cornstarch was already competing with it by then and later largely displaced it. "Sippets" is generally taken to be a diminutive of the older English "sop," a piece of bread for dipping, and had been in print for a long time before Oscar used it.