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April 5
Menu: White Soup; Fried Fillets of Haddock; Roast Chicken, Bread Sauce; Potato Chips Brussels Sprouts; Cress and Orange Salad; Iced Castle Puddings; Coffee White Soup-2 small onions, 1 turnip, 1 pound potatoes, 1 stalk celery, 2 small parsnips or artichokes, 3 pints water, 1½ pint milk, 1 tablespoon flour or cornstarch, 2 tablespoons Crisco, and salt to taste. Cut about 2 pounds of any white vegetables, previously washed and peeled, into pieces, or preferably several kinds mixed, and boil them until soft in the water with salt and Crisco. Rub them through sieve or colander, put them back in the stew pan with milk, and let boil. Put in flour, mixed smoothly with little cold water or milk, let soup boil for 10 minutes, and then serve.
A plain puree soup of white vegetables, thickened with a flour slurry and enriched with milk. The listed vegetables come to roughly the two pounds the method calls for, and the proportions are forgiving.
- "Artichokes" hereIn a list of white root vegetables alongside parsnips, this means Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), not globe artichokes. Salsify or celeriac substitute well if sunchokes are hard to find.
- Crisco stands in for butterThe two tablespoons of shortening in the cooking water are there because the book is selling Crisco; unsalted butter does the same job and tastes better in a milk soup.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing hot vegetables through a sieve is slow work. A food mill gives the same slightly rustic texture; an immersion blender gives a smoother, more modern result, though potato blended hard can turn gluey, so pulse rather than run it.
- The thickeningMix the tablespoon of flour or cornstarch with cold liquid to a thin, lump-free cream before it goes in. Cornstarch needs only a minute or two once boiling, so the full ten minutes is really for cooking out the raw taste of flour.
- Watch the milkOnce the puree and milk are together, the mixture catches easily on the pan bottom. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, rather than the vigorous boil implied.
- Seasoning"Salt to taste" is the only seasoning given. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and a bay leaf in the boiling water bring it up to modern expectations.
- YieldThree pints of water plus a pint and a half of milk gives roughly two and a quarter quarts, or six to eight first-course servings.
White soups — potages blancs — were a fixture of nineteenth-century household cookery, the pale counterpart to brown stock-based soups, and the term is often said to have drifted from the old almond-and-veal versions to mean simply a milk-thickened puree of pale vegetables by the early 1900s. This one appears in a calendar of dinners, dated April 6, a device used to give the housewife a full year of planned menus. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, was new enough at the time that its makers had to teach cooks where it might go — including two tablespoons in the boiling water of a vegetable soup, where it does very little beyond keeping the brand in front of the reader.