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Quick Celery Soup
1 pint cleaned celery stalks, ground 1 small onion, ground 1 quart boiling water or soup stock 1 pint milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon Karo 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1 egg (optional) Boil the celery in the water twenty-five minutes. Add the seasonings and milk and when boiling, thicken with the Mazola and cornstarch creamed together. Pour boiling hot onto a beaten egg and serve with croutons.
A branded promotional recipe, which explains the corn oil, corn syrup and cornstarch all appearing in one modest soup. The technique is sound once you translate the trade names and rethink the thickening.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil, Karo is corn syrup, and Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarch — all products of the same company that issued the book. Any neutral oil and any cornstarch will do; the teaspoon of syrup presumably rounds off celery's bitter edge and can be replaced with a pinch of sugar or dropped.
- "Ground" celery and onionThis means run through a hand-cranked food grinder, the standard tool of the period. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the same coarse pulp; do not purée it to liquid or the soup turns pasty. A pint of stalks is roughly 6 to 8 ribs.
- ThickeningCreaming oil and cornstarch together stood in for a butter-and-flour roux, and it is the least reliable part of the recipe — an oil-and-starch paste can go lumpy or separate when it meets hot liquid. Slaking the 2 tablespoons of cornstarch in a little cold milk and whisking that in, then stirring the oil in at the end, is more dependable.
- The egg liaisonPouring the boiling soup onto a beaten egg thickens and enriches it; the egg must go into the tureen or bowl, not the pot, and the soup must not return to the boil or it will curdle into threads. Note that one egg diluted this way never reaches a pasteurising temperature, so anyone avoiding lightly cooked egg should leave it out — the cornstarch carries the body on its own.
- Boiling timeTwenty-five minutes at a rolling boil is longer than ground celery needs and dulls its flavour. A gentle simmer of 15 to 20 minutes extracts plenty; if you want a smoother result, strain the pulp out before the milk goes in.
- Straining or notThe recipe leaves the ground celery in, so expect a soup with texture and some string. Pressing it through a sieve after cooking, or blending and then sieving, gives the smooth cream-of-celery most people now expect.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, enough for four to six as a luncheon first course. Season again at the end — a quart of water plus a pint of milk swallows a single teaspoon of salt, and stock in place of water helps considerably.
This comes from the era when American cornstarch and corn oil manufacturers sold their goods largely through recipe booklets, and the tell is in the ingredient list: Karo syrup, Mazola oil and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch were all lines of the Corn Products Refining Company, which distributed cookbooks like this to teach cooks new uses for corn products in dishes that had traditionally called for butter and flour. Mazola in particular was marketed as an economical stand-in for butter in sauces and soups, which is why the thickening here is oil creamed with starch rather than a conventional roux. Cream of celery soup itself was a fixture of light luncheon menus by the 1910s ly genteel vegetable, and cooking down the outer stalks and trimmings into a soup made thrifty use of them.