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When using the hearts of cabbage-lettuce for salad, prepare soup from the best outside leaves.
Wash well lettuce leaves and parsley, add onions and carrots, pour over them the water and cook until the vegetables are soft enough to put through a strainer. (The pulp should be scraped from strainer and used.) Thicken this liquid with blended flour and water, let boil, then gradually add scalded milk.
IIO
A frugal lettuce soup with no quantities at all, which is typical of left-over cookery: the amount is whatever you have. What follows fills in the working details the original assumes you know.
- No measurements are givenThe recipe names no weights, no volume of water and no amount of milk. As a working frame, the outer leaves of two heads of lettuce, a handful of parsley, one onion and one carrot to about a quart of water will produce roughly four servings; the milk is added to taste at the end, usually a cup or so.
- "Cabbage-lettuce"An older name for the firm-headed lettuces — iceberg, butterhead and their kin — as distinct from loose-leaf types. The hearts were the salad; the coarse, sometimes bitter, dark outer leaves were the soup.
- BitternessOlder or bolted lettuce turns noticeably bitter when cooked. Discard any leaf that is limp, yellowed or slimy rather than boiling it, and taste the broth before adding milk.
- Putting it through a strainerAt the time this meant pressing the softened vegetables through a wire sieve with a wooden spoon or pestle, which is why the instruction to scrape the pulp off the underside matters — that pulp is the body of the soup. A food mill does the same job; a blender does it faster and finer, though it will lighten the colour.
- "Blended flour and water"A slurry, not a roux: about two tablespoons of flour whisked smooth into a little cold water, stirred into the simmering liquid. Bring it to a real boil for a minute or two afterwards or the soup keeps a raw, pasty flour taste.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below the boil, small bubbles at the edge. Scalding was commonly explained both as a way of dealing with unpasteurised milk and as a way of keeping cold milk from dropping the soup off the boil. With pasteurised milk it is simply insurance against curdling — add it warm, off the heat, and do not let the soup boil again.
- SeasoningNone is specified. Salt the cooking water lightly and correct at the end; a scrape of nutmeg suits a milk-thickened vegetable soup.
Books of this kind belonged to a long tradition of household economy writing that treated waste as a moral as much as a financial failing, and they multiplied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as middle-class kitchens shrank their staff and took on more of the work themselves. Cooked lettuce strikes many modern cooks as odd, but it was ordinary in French and English kitchens well before this book — lettuce appears braised, stewed with peas, and puréed into soups in earlier manuals — and the head lettuces sold whole gave every salad-maker a pile of tough outer leaves to account for. The method here is the standard potage pattern of the period: soften vegetables in water, sieve them, bind with a flour slurry, finish with milk or cream. The stray "IIO" at the end is a page number caught by the scanner rather than part of the recipe.