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Cream of Turnip and Potato Soup
cup mashed pota-1/4 cup mashed turnip, toes 3 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful butter white or yellow ½ teaspoonful salt Few grains paprika Pour the scalded milk over the mashed potatoes and turnips and strain through a fine wire sieve.
Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook until bubbling, then add the hot milk mixture and cook until smooth and thickened. Serve very hot with rye-bread croutons. If the soup is too thick a little more hot milk may be added. .
A thrifty purée soup built on yesterday's mashed vegetables and a thin white sauce. It comes together in about fifteen minutes and serves three to four as a first course.
- The ingredient list, sorted outThe quantities are one cup mashed turnip and one cup mashed potato, three cups scalded milk, one tablespoon each butter and flour, half a teaspoon salt and a few grains paprika. The potato measure has been lost in the original column and should be read as one cup to match the turnip.
- White or yellow turnipThe note refers to white turnip or yellow rutabaga (swede). Rutabaga gives a sweeter, deeper-coloured, more assertive soup; white turnip stays pale and peppery. Either works, but leftover mash of one or the other should already be seasoned lightly or the soup will taste flat.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim, around 180F, but do not boil it. Scalding was partly a keeping-and-safety measure in the days of raw milk; with pasteurised milk it mainly keeps the sauce from cooling as it comes together.
- The straining is the pointPushing the milk-and-mash mixture through a fine sieve is what makes this a cream soup rather than lumpy gravy. A food mill or a blender does the same work faster, though a blender run too long makes potato gluey, so pulse briefly.
- Cook the roux, but keep it paleStir the flour into the melted butter and cook only until it bubbles, roughly a minute. Browning it would tint a soup meant to stay pale and light-bodied.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to three cups of liquid is a very thin binding; the potato starch does most of the thickening. Judge by eye after two or three minutes of simmering and thin with more hot milk as the recipe suggests.
- Rye-bread croutonsCut day-old rye into small dice and crisp them in butter in a skillet, or on a sheet pan at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes. Caraway rye is a common choice and its flavour plays well against the turnip.
Cream soups of this kind were a staple of American "left over" cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century: a cup of any cooked vegetable, milk, and a spoonful each of butter and flour would yield a course that looked deliberate rather than salvaged. The domestic-science schools taught white-sauce proportions of butter, flour and milk as a set of standard formulas to be applied to whatever the pantry held, though the single tablespoon of flour here is thinner than the usual thin white sauce. Turnip and potato are both winter keepers long used together in northern European kitchens. Books devoted entirely to leftovers were common in this period and again during the two world wars, when household thrift was framed as a civic duty as much as a private economy.