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VEGETABLES (During warm weather when)
During warm weather, when vegetables are most abundant, great care should be taken not to allow them to accumulate in the ice-box or pantry, as they spoil quickly after being cooked.
As a general rule, they are not injured, either in digestibility or flavor, by reheating, and as they are an expensive item in the food bill, especially in cities, they should never be wasted. Even a spoonful or two of almost any cooked vegetable will help to flavor a soup or sauce.
Dried Celery Leaves or Parsley Thoroughly dry all celery leaves or parsley in a cool oven or on the warming shelf. Pulverize by rubbing through a sieve and put in bottles. These make an unexcelled seasoning for soups.
Macédoine Garnish A few spoonfuls of cooked peas, asparagus tips, carrots, or string-beans that have been served without a cream sauce, may any or all be reheated and used to garnish a platter of broiled chops. A few left-over radishes kept crisp and sliced very thin, IOI without peeling, make an attractive garnish with parsley and slices of lemon for baked fish.
Purée of Vegetable Take one creamed onion, a few peas, carrots, string-beans, or other green vegetables left from dinner, and while still slightly warm pass them through a sieve together. Keep in a cool place.
Use this pulp the next day for a cream soup by seasoning it as needed, adding to it equal quantity white sauce No. I (see page 67, and heating all together. A spoonful or two of sweet cream is always an addition to such soups.
Three small procedures are buried in this page of advice: a dried herb seasoning, a warm vegetable garnish, and a purée that becomes cream soup. The hinge is temperature control, since the whole section was written for an ice-box rather than a refrigerator.
- Cool place means refrigeratorThe instruction to keep the purée "in a cool place" overnight assumes a well-iced box at roughly 45-50F. Cool the purée quickly, cover it, and refrigerate at 40F or below; cooked low-acid vegetables held at room temperature are a genuine spoilage risk, which is exactly what the opening paragraph is warning about.
- Drying the celery leavesPeriod cookbooks generally put a "cool oven" somewhat higher than we would for drying herbs; for this purpose use the lowest setting your oven offers, with the door cracked. Spread the leaves in a single layer and give them 1-2 hours until they crumble between the fingers. The "warming shelf" was the plate-warming compartment above a coal range; a dehydrator or a gas oven with only the pilot lit does the same job.
- Sieving versus grindingRubbing dried leaves through a sieve produces a coarse powder that still smells of celery. A few pulses in a spice grinder is faster but overheats delicate parsley; either way, store in a small tightly closed jar away from light and expect the flavour to fade after about six months.
- White sauce No. IThe cross-referenced sauce is on page 67; a "No. 1" white sauce in books of this kind is normally the thin version, on the order of 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, salted -- check the page for the book's own proportions. Equal parts sauce and vegetable pulp gives a soup of pouring consistency; thin with stock or milk if the pulp is heavy on carrot or bean.
- A sieve, not a blenderPassing the vegetables through a sieve removes pea skins, bean strings and onion fibre, which is the point. A blender or food processor will emulsify those fibres into the soup instead; if you use one, finish by pressing the purée through a fine strainer.
- Reheating the garnishPeas, asparagus tips and beans that are already cooked need only 1-2 minutes in a little butter over moderate heat. Anything longer and the colour goes from green to olive, which defeats the purpose of a macédoine.
- MacédoineThe term means a mixture of vegetables cut to a uniform small dice. If you are combining carrot with peas, cut the carrot to pea size so the garnish reads as deliberate rather than as leftovers.
- YieldThe puràe as described makes roughly 2 cups of soup, or two servings, depending on how much came off the dinner plates. Season at the end: yesterday's vegetables were already salted.
This section belongs to a genre of American household writing that treated waste as a moral as much as a financial failing, and its logic is refrigeration-shaped. Before mechanical refrigeration was common in homes, the ice-box held food at a temperature that varied with the size of the ice block and the weather, so cooked vegetables in July genuinely did have to be used within a day or two. The advice to dry celery leaves and parsley reflects the same economy: celery was sold with its full leafy tops, and turning them into a bottled seasoning powder put to use a part of the plant that might otherwise have gone into the bin. The purée-into-cream-soup trick, built on a thin white sauce, is the standard early twentieth-century route to a vegetable soup and shows how thoroughly the roux-and-milk formula had been absorbed into ordinary American cooking by way of domestic-science teaching.