Potato Soup
Some To one gallon of water add six large potatoes chopped fine, one tea-cup rice, a lump of butter size of an egg, one table-spoon flour. Work butter and flour together, and add one tea-cup sweet cream just before taking from the fire. Boil one hour. - Miss Lida Canby.
A thin, thrifty potato-and-rice soup of the kind that fed a large table from very little. The instructions are terse even by 1880s standards, and a few of the measures need translating.
- That stray "Some"The recipe opens with an orphaned word, almost certainly a compositor's error or the tail of the previous entry's heading. Ignore it; the recipe begins at "To one gallon of water."
- A teacup is not a measuring cupIn period American cookbooks a teacup is reckoned anywhere from a half-cup to a full cup, with about 3/4 cup the usual compromise. Taking it as 3/4 cup rice and 3/4 cup cream will be close enough to the author's intent.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Worked with the tablespoon of flour it makes a beurre manié — a raw paste of fat and flour whisked in to thicken.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream and clabber also kept in period kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the right substitute.
- Add the cream off the boilAdd the cream at the end -- The recipe has the cream stirred in just before the pot comes off the fire, not after it. Either way, keep it clear of a full rolling boil, which can cause the cream to break and the soup to go grainy.
- An hour is deliberateThe long boil is meant to disintegrate the potato and burst the rice so the soup thickens itself. Modern instinct is to shorten it, but a shorter cook will leave the potato and rice more distinct than the recipe intends. Stir the bottom, since rice settles and scorches.
- Season it yourselfNo salt or pepper appears, which is normal for the period — seasoning was assumed. A gallon of water needs a good deal of salt; add it early so the potatoes take it up, and finish with white pepper.
- Water, not stockNothing here but water, butter and cream, so the flavor rests entirely on the potatoes. A quart of the gallon replaced with chicken or vegetable broth is a departure from the recipe but a defensible one.
- YieldA gallon of liquid plus a cup of rice makes eight to ten generous servings. Halve everything for a household of four.
Potato soups like this one sit at the plain end of the nineteenth-century American soup repertoire: no stock, no aromatics, no garnish, thickened with rice and enriched at the last moment with whatever cream the house had. The Dixie Cook-Book, first issued in the 1880s, was compiled in the pattern common to regional cookbooks of the era — recipes printed under contributors' names, often with the same dish appearing two or three times in slightly different versions. The attribution to Miss Lida Canby is the whole of the recipe's provenance, and it is why entries like this survive: they record what one particular kitchen actually did, down to the butter measured against an egg rather than a scale.