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Potato Soup for Lent
Mrs. G. B. Wyllie.
Slice and fry to a nice brown four large onions in quarter pound of butter in your soup pot, add four quarts of skim milk, have pealed and boiled a good three pints of potatoes, mash them fine and reduce smooth with the milk from your soup pot; repeat this till all the potatoes are in your soup pot; just bring to a boil and add pepper and salt to taste.
A large, plain potato and onion soup built on browned onions in butter and thinned with milk rather than stock. The whole thing hinges on the milk: once the potatoes are in it, it must not boil hard or it will scorch on the bottom and catch a burnt taste that no amount of seasoning will hide.
- Scale and yieldFour quarts of milk plus three pints of potatoes gives roughly five quarts of finished soup, enough for 16 to 20 servings. Halving or quartering the recipe works without any other change.
- Quarter pound of butterThat is 1/2 cup, or one American stick. It is a generous amount for four onions and it is doing double duty as the browning fat and the richness the skim milk lacks.
- Three pints of potatoesA volume measure of peeled potato, so roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb. A floury variety (russet, or a baking potato) mashes smoothest; waxy potatoes are harder to bring smooth.
- \"Reduce smooth with the milk" -- This means slacken the mashed potato with hot milk ladled from the pot, a batch at a time, then return the smooth mixture. Dropping dry mash straight into the pot is what produces lumps.
- Keep the heat low once combined"Just bring to a boil" is literal. Starch-thickened milk sticks and browns quickly; use a heavy pot, stir across the bottom, and pull it off as soon as it lifts to a simmer.
- Browning the onionsTake them to a real brown, not just soft, over medium heat for 20 to 25 minutes. That colour is the only savoury depth in a soup with no meat or stock in it.
- Skim milk on purposeSkim milk -- Skim milk was the thrifty by-product of butter-making, and would have been the milk to hand in a farm household. Whole milk gives a rounder soup; the recipe tolerates either.
- Seasoning and servingSalt at the end, after the starch has thickened, and be freer with it than seems right — milk and potato both swallow salt. Chopped parsley or chives, or a few croutons fried in the same butter, are period-appropriate finishes.
Meatless soups like this one belong to the practical side of the Lenten fast, when broth and bacon fat were off the table but butter, milk and eggs were, in later and uneven relaxations of a fast that had once restricted dairy and eggs too, often allowed. The use of skim milk is a farm household detail: cream was skimmed off for butter and the remaining milk had to be used quickly, and a soup of potatoes, onions and skim milk cost almost nothing. The Home Cook Book (first published in Toronto in 1877) was compiled from contributed recipes signed by name, which is why this appears as Mrs. G. B. Wyllie's rather than as a general formula; the terse, second-person style, assuming the reader already knows how brown is brown, is typical of those compiled charity cookbooks written by cooks for cooks.