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Carrot and Rice Soup
1 cup mashed, cooked carrots 3 cups milk 1 cup water in which the car rots were boiled 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains nutmeg 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 tablespoon Mazola 3/4 cup cooked rice 1½ teaspoons minced parsley Combine the carrots, carrot water and milk. Scald, season, and thicken with the cornstarch and Mazola creamed together. thicken with the cornstarch and Mazola creamed together.
Add the rice, reheat and serve sprinkled with the parsley.
A thin, gently spiced cream soup that leans on cornstarch rather than a butter roux — a signature move of the corn-products cookbooks this comes from. The technique needs a little care, but the ingredients are all still on the shelf.
- The hinge: creaming starch with oilCornstarch stirred into oil forms a loose slurry, not a stable paste like a butter roux, and it will separate if it sits. Mix it right before use, pour it into the scalded liquid in a thin stream while whisking hard, then keep whisking until it thickens.
- Cook the starch outOnce the soup thickens, hold it at a bare simmer for two to three minutes. Cornstarch pulled off the heat the moment it sets tastes chalky, and the soup will thin again on standing if the granules never fully swell.
- ScaldHeat the milk-and-carrot mixture until it steams and bubbles ring the edge of the pan, roughly 180F. Do not boil it, and stir the bottom — carrot purée scorches readily in milk.
- Brand namesArgo and Kingsford's cornstarch are ordinary cornstarch; Mazola is corn oil. Any neutral oil works, and a tablespoon of butter gives a rounder result if you would rather.
- Carrot waterThe cooking liquid is doing real work here, carrying colour and sweetness. If you steam or roast the carrots instead, substitute a light vegetable stock rather than plain water or the soup will taste flat.
- RiceThe recipe calls for cooked rice, added at the end. It will keep absorbing liquid, so expect the soup to thicken noticeably if it stands or is reheated the next day.
- SeasoningThree-quarters of a teaspoon of salt for five-odd cups of soup is modest by current taste. Season again after the starch has cooked, when the texture is settled.
- YieldAround five to six cups — four to six small first-course servings, or two to three as a light supper with bread.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch and Mazola corn oil, a genre that flourished in American kitchens from the 1910s through the 1930s: free or near-free booklets in which every recipe happened to require the sponsor's products. The tell here is the thickening method. A cook of the period would ordinarily have made a white sauce by cooking flour in butter, but this recipe substitutes cornstarch creamed with corn oil, which both replaces the flour and displaces the dairy fat in a single stroke. Corn oil was a byproduct of wet corn milling that manufacturers spent decades persuading home cooks to treat as a cooking fat rather than an industrial one, and soups like this one — cheap, mild, built on leftover vegetables and leftover rice — were the vehicle. The nutmeg is conventional, a seasoning often said to echo the habits of nineteenth-century béchamel.