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Asparagus Soup
Cut the tender tips from cooked asparagus, set them aside and cook the stalks in some of the water in which the asparagus was cooked the day before. Cook down to a cupful, strain, and add to two cupfuls of white sauce No I A (see page 68). Heat to boiling, add the asparagus tips, and serve.
Baked-Bean and Tomato Purée 2 cups baked beans I onion, sliced 2 cups cold water 1 pint stewed and 1 tablespoonful flour strained tomato Sugar, salt, and pepper to taste Cook beans and onion in water until very soft.
Strain. To one cup of thick bean pulp add tomato and seasoning. Thicken with the flour mixed smooth in two tablespoonfuls of water. Boil well after adding flour. If too thick, hot water may be added.
Baked-Bean Soup (with Milk) 1 cup bean pulp Salt and pepper 2 cups thin white ' sauce No. I (see page 67) Prepare bean pulp as in preceding rule, combine it with the thin white sauce, add seasoning and, if necessary, hot milk to thin it.
Three short soups run together here, all built on yesterday's vegetables and a flour-thickened sauce. The book's cross-references to numbered white sauces are the only real obstacle.
- White sauce No. 1 and No. 1AThese refer to the book's own sauce table; the book calls No. 1 a thin white sauce, but what distinguishes No. 1A is not stated on this page. A thin white sauce of this period runs roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, a medium about 2 tablespoons of each. Make the quantity called for and season it before it meets the vegetable pulp.
- The hinge: don't lose the tipsThe whole point of the asparagus soup is that the woody stalks give flavour to the liquid while the tips stay intact. Add them at the very end and let them warm through only — a minute or two. Simmered with the base they turn grey and stringy.
- Yesterday's cooking waterThe recipe assumes you saved the asparagus water. If you did not, use light stock or water; if the saved water has been sitting more than a day in the refrigerator, start fresh rather than build a soup on it.
- "Cook down to a cupful"This is a reduction instruction, not a time. Start with 2 to 3 cups of asparagus liquid and stalks and simmer uncovered until you have about a cup, then press through a sieve and discard the fibre.
- Baked beansPeriod baked beans meant navy beans slow-baked with salt pork and molasses, so the purée arrives already sweet and salty. Canned baked beans work, but taste before adding the sugar and salt at the end.
- Cooking the flour out"Boil well after adding flour" matters in the tomato purée — a raw flour-and-water slurry tastes pasty. Two to three minutes at a simmer, stirring, is enough.
- Tomato and milk togetherThe tomato version is made without milk, and the milk version carries no tomato. Acid tomato added to a milk sauce will curdle it; if you want both, temper by adding the hot tomato to the hot white sauce slowly, off the boil, and serve at once.
- YieldEach of the three makes roughly 3 cups, or two generous first-course servings.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the two world wars: books organised not by course but by what was already in the larder. Its economy is domestic rather than patriotic: before reliable home refrigeration, cooked vegetables and their cooking water had a working life of a day or so, and a soup was the standard way to spend it. The reliance on standard white sauces is characteristic of the cooking-school movement associated with Boston and Fannie Farmer, which standardised thin, medium and thick white sauces by name; the numbering scheme here appears to be this book's own device, letting later recipes simply refer back. Asparagus lent itself especially well to this thrift: the tender tips were served as a vegetable in their own right, and the tough lower stalks, too fibrous to eat, still carried plenty of flavour to be simmered out and strained away.