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Cream-of-Lettuce Soup
I qt. milk, scalded I pt. cold water Lettuce leaves 2 or 3 small carrots Salt and pepper Handful of parsley 3 white onions (cooked ones may be used) Flour for thickening (about 2½ tablespoonfuls)
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — typical of the terse, thrift-minded style of left-over cookery books, which assumed the reader already knew how to build a cream soup. The quantities are sound; the procedure has to be reconstructed.
- The missing methodSimmer the carrots, onions and lettuce in the pint of cold water until tender, then puree or press through a sieve. Thicken the scalded milk with the 2 tablespoonfuls of flour — either worked into a roux with butter (no fat is listed in the recipe) or blended smooth with a little cold liquid first — combine with the vegetable puree, season, and finish with the parsley. This is a reconstruction, not the book's own instruction.
- MeasuresA quart is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups — a 2:1 ratio of milk to vegetable liquid. Two tablespoons of flour to 6 cups of total liquid gives a very thin soup by modern standards; expect something closer to a broth than a chowder.
- Scalding the milkHeating milk to just below boiling was originally done to check the souring organisms and enzymes in unpasteurized milk. With pasteurized milk it is no longer necessary, though warming it before it goes into the thickening still prevents lumps.
- Lettuce, quantity unstated"Lettuce leaves" is genuinely open-ended — the point of the book is that you use whatever is left in the crisper. A quart of loosely packed outer leaves, the tough green ones usually discarded, is a reasonable reading. Iceberg and romaine hearts contribute little flavour; the coarse outer leaves and any bolted lettuce are what this is for.
- White onionsProbably small white boiling onions rather than the large yellow storage onion, though the term can also simply mean a white-skinned onion; on the former reading three would be roughly one medium onion's worth. The parenthetical allowing already-cooked ones suits a book built around left-overs: boiled onions from a previous meal go straight in.
- Don't boil after the milk goes inOnce the thickened milk and the vegetable puree are combined, hold it below a simmer. Prolonged boiling will curdle a flour-thickened milk soup and dull the green colour.
- SeasoningLettuce is mild to the point of vanishing. Season assertively with salt, add white pepper if you want to keep the pale colour, and consider a grating of nutmeg, a common enough finish for cream soups though not called for here.
- YieldSix cups of liquid gives four to six first-course servings.
Cream-of-lettuce soup belongs to the family of French potages built on a milk or velouté base and whatever green was to hand — lettuce, sorrel, watercress, pea shoots. Its appearance in a left-overs book is the point: lettuce wilts faster than almost anything else in the larder, and the coarse outer leaves were routinely stripped off and thrown away before serving a salad. Books of this kind, which proliferated in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century and multiplied again under wartime food conservation campaigns, treated that waste as a household failing rather than an inevitability. The compressed format here — a bare list of what goes in, with no instructions — assumes a cook who has made a dozen cream soups already and needs only to be told that lettuce will work too.