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Puree of Green Squash
Peel and cut in pieces one fresh, medium squash; place in a saucepan with a sliced carrot, one onion, two leeks, one branch parsley, one bean crushed garlic, a sprig thyme, one bay leaf and one clove; add one ounce butter and cook on fire fifteen minutes. Moisten with two and a half quarts broth, one pint of milk, and add two peeled sliced raw potatoes. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Mix well. Cover pan and simmer one and a half hours. Press through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, drop in bread croutons and serve.
A straightforward vegetable purée soup built on the standard French pattern: sweat the aromatics in butter, moisten, simmer, sieve. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- "Green squash"In a book of this period the term most likely refers to a soft summer squash -- marrow, crookneck, or what we now call zucchini -- rather than a hard winter squash. One medium specimen or two, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb, is about the right weight; the recipe does say to peel it, though thin skin can be left on.
- "One bean crushed garlic"A bean-sized piece of garlic, which is one ordinary clove. It is not a bean, and the recipe wants garlic in the background rather than the foreground.
- Chinese strainerA chinois: the tall conical fine-mesh strainer, worked with a ladle or pestle. The two-stage straining (coarse sieve, then chinois) exists because there was no blender. A blender or immersion blender followed by one pass through a fine sieve gives the same texture in a fraction of the time.
- The potatoes are the bodyTwo raw potatoes are not filler — they are what keeps the purée from separating into water and pulp once it is strained. Use a floury or all-purpose potato, and do not leave them out.
- Simmering timeAn hour and a half was needed to break down vegetables for hand-sieving. If you are blending, 30 to 40 minutes is enough for the potato to collapse; longer only dulls the squash and drives off liquid.
- The bouquetParsley, thyme, bay and the single clove should come out before puréeing. Tie them in a bundle or bag them, or you will be picking a clove out of the blender.
- Liquid and seasoningTwo and a half quarts of broth plus a pint of milk is a great deal of liquid for one squash; expect a thin, drinkable soup. Add the milk in the last stretch of cooking rather than at the start if you are working over high heat, and check the salt after straining, since the volume will have reduced.
- YieldThe three quarts of liquid will reduce over the long simmer, so expect roughly two and a half to three quarts finished, or about 8 to 12 first-course servings. Halve the whole thing for a household of four.
Filippini's book, like much professional American cookery of the early 1900s, takes its soup grammar straight from the French kitchen: this is a pur\a long family of purée soups thickened with potato and finished through a chinois. The two-stage straining is the tell of a pre-blender professional kitchen, where a smooth purée was bought with labour rather than horsepower. Squash of the soft summer sort was abundant and cheap in American markets, and turning cheap vegetables into a refined, silky, croutoned soup was precisely the sort of transformation a hotel chef was hired to perform. The vegetable base here — carrot, onion, leek, parsley, thyme, bay, clove, a single garlic clove — is the standard aromatic set that appears, with small variations, under many headings in books of this era.