Home › Luncheon › Quick Carrot Soup
Quick Carrot Soup
Follow the directions for Quick Celery Soup, substituting for the celery, carrots which have been scraped and put through the food chopper. One-half cup of cooked rice may be added.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe, and the page assumes you have the Quick Celery Soup formula in front of you. If you do not, the pattern behind almost all "quick" cream soups of this era is easy enough to reconstruct.
- The missing base recipeQuick cream soups of this period generally run to milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, seasoned with salt, pepper and often a little onion, with the finely ground vegetable stirred in; a pint to a quart of milk would be a plausible working quantity. Without the celery version in hand the quantities here are genuinely unstated; treat the proportions as your own.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked food chopper clamped to the table produced a coarse, wet mince rather than a puree. The box grater's fine side or a few pulses in a food processor gives the same result; a blender turns the carrot to liquid, which changes the soup's character.
- Carrots are not celeryThis is the hinge. Ground celery softens in minutes in hot milk; ground carrot does not. Cook the carrot in a little salted water or stock until tender before it goes anywhere near the milk, or the soup will be thin-tasting and gritty.
- Do not boil the milkOnce the milk and roux are combined, keep the pot below a simmer. A hard boil will scorch the bottom and can make the milk separate.
- The half cup of riceCooked rice thickens as it sits and will absorb most of the liquid if the soup is held or reheated. Add it at the end, and expect to loosen the soup with more milk on the second day.
- SeasoningCarrot needs more salt than celery does, and takes well to a pinch of nutmeg, white pepper or a little sugar to lift its sweetness. Taste after the vegetable goes in, not before.
- YieldIf you build it on a quart of milk, expect roughly four luncheon first-course servings, or two or three as a main dish with bread; the original gives no quantities at all.
Cross-referenced variations like this one are a hallmark of early twentieth-century American cookbooks, which taught cooking as a set of formulas rather than a list of separate dishes: learn one cream soup and you have learned a dozen, swapping in celery, carrot, pea, spinach or corn. The technique is often traced to the white sauce taught in the domestic science schools of the 1890s and 1900s, where a measured roux and scalded milk were held up as proof that cookery could be systematic. "Quick" in the title presumably signals speed of preparation, though what exactly it is being contrasted with is not spelled out. The optional cooked rice, likewise, is offered without explanation.