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Cream, Kalamazoo
Finely slice a medium carrot, onion, two leeks, ten branches celery and three medium-sized, raw beetroots, place in saucepan with an ounce butter and cook for ten minutes, carefully stirring meanwhile. Moisten with one and a half quarts each broth and water, season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon pepper. Crack in small pieces a few raw or cooked chicken bones if at hand, then let slowly boil for one and a half hours. Place in a bowl two and a half ounces rice flour, pour into it two gills milk and one gill cream, whisk until well diluted, then pour it in the soup. Mix well until it comes to a boil, let boil for five minutes, then add half an ounce butter and mix well for one minute. Strain cream through sieve into a basin, then through cheesecloth into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of croutons separately.
A pale rose-colored cream soup in the classic French style, thickened with rice flour rather than roux and passed twice for smoothness. Nothing here is difficult, but the straining and the handling of the rice flour decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: strain twice, in that orderThe vegetables are flavor and color only; none of them stays in the bowl. Sieve first to break down and remove the solids, then pass the liquid through damp cheesecloth to catch the fine grit that makes a cream soup feel sandy. Skipping the second pass leaves you with a rough purée, not a cream.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk is 1 cup and one gill cream is 1/2 cup. The 2 1/2 ounces of rice flour is a weight, roughly half a cup; measure it on a scale if you can, since rice flour packs unevenly.
- "Ten branches celery"A branch here means a single rib, not a whole head. Ten ribs is most of one bunch. Use the outer stalks and the leaves, which carry more flavor than the pale heart.
- Liquid volume and yieldA quart and a half each of broth and water makes 3 quarts before reduction, with another 1 1/2 cups of milk and cream added at the end. How much you finish with depends on how hard it boils and how much is lost in the two strainings; the recipe gives no yield.
- Adding the rice flour slurryWhisk the rice flour into the cold milk and cream until there are no lumps, then pour it into the simmering soup in a steady stream while stirring. Rice flour sets its thickening as it reaches the boil, so the five minutes of boiling called for is necessary to cook out the raw starch taste.
- The finishing butterThe recipe adds the last half ounce after the five-minute boil and mixes it for a minute; best done off the heat or at a bare simmer, since hard boiling after the butter goes in can make it separate and float.
- Chicken bonesOptional, and worth including if you have a carcass. Crack them so the marrow is exposed, and skim the surface as the soup boils; the bones will throw scum and fat that would otherwise cloud the finished cream.
- ColorThree raw beets tint the soup pink, and the milk and cream mute it further. Beet pigment is heat-sensitive, so the recipe's hour-and-a-half boil will dull the color toward a brownish rose whatever you do.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is modest for 3 quarts of liquid, particularly if the broth is unsalted. Taste and correct after straining, when the soup is at its final concentration.
This is a soup from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), which ran to well over a thousand recipes and followed the Escoffier-era habit of naming each cream, purée and consommé after a person, a place or a patron. "Cream" here is a category, the French crème: a vegetable-based soup passed through a sieve and finished with milk, cream and butter, served with croutons on a separate plate so they stay crisp. The Kalamazoo attached to it is the Michigan city, which by the 1890s was known nationally for celery grown on its drained marsh lands and sold by the bunch at railway platforms across the Midwest; celery is prominent in the pot, and it is tempting to read the city's name on a dish of this period as a nod to that trade, though the connection is inference rather than documented. The beets do double duty as sweetener and dye, a common trick before commercial colorings, and the rice-flour liaison is one of several ways a chef might bind a cream soup, classic crèmes being commonly thickened with béchamel or a flour roux.