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April 17
Menu: Potato Soup; Breaded Lamb Chops, Tomato Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Creamed Turnips Cheese Salad; Canary Pudding Coffee Potato Soup-1 quart white second stock or water, 1½ pint milk, 1 pound potatoes, 1 onion, 1 stalk celery, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon fine sago or crushed tapioca, salt and pepper to taste. Slice potatoes, onion, and celery. Make Crisco hot in stewpan, add vegetables, fry and cook until Crisco is absorbed, stirring frequently to prevent them browning. Add stock, and simmer until vegetables are tender (about 1 hour). Rub through fine sieve; return to saucepan, add milk, and bring to boil. Sprinkle in sago, cook until transparent, add seasoning to taste, and serve.
A plain sieved potato soup from the Crisco company's calendar of dinners, thickened at the end with sago rather than flour. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms belong to a 1913 kitchen.
- Do not let the vegetables colourThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to fry "until Crisco is absorbed" without browning. This is a sweat, not a saute: low heat, lid ajar, 8-10 minutes, so the onion and celery go soft and sweet and the soup stays pale.
- White second stockSecond stock is the weaker liquid drawn from bones that have already made one batch. A light chicken or vegetable stock, or the water the recipe offers as an alternative, does the same job.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product the book was written to sell. It is still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter or a neutral oil works in the same quantity.
- Fine sago or crushed tapiocaBoth are starch pearls; sago comes from palm pith, tapioca from cassava. Fine sago is hard to find outside Asian and South Asian grocers. Small pearl tapioca, crushed, is the intended substitute and cooks in roughly 10 minutes, going from white to clear.
- Rubbing through a sieveAn immersion blender does the work in seconds, but the soup will be thicker and slightly gluey if you overwork the potato starch. Pulse briefly, or pass it through a food mill for the texture the original intends.
- Adding the milkBring it just to a boil and no further. A hard boil after the milk goes in will make the soup catch on the pan bottom and taste scorched.
- TimingOne hour of simmering is generous for sliced potato. Forty minutes is usually enough; test with a knife rather than a clock.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, which is six to eight bowls as a first course.
Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the recipe books that followed it were straightforward advertising: prove the new hydrogenated shortening could do everything butter, lard and suet did. The "calendar of dinners" format, with a dated menu for each day of the year, was a common device in period cookbooks, meant to relieve the housekeeper of the daily question of what to serve. This soup is the plainest sort of English-style puree, and its use of sago as a finishing thickener rather than flour or cream is often associated with a tradition of invalid and nursery cookery, where starch pearls were valued as light and easily digested, though such soups were by no means confined to the sickroom. Sago and tapioca were staple pantry goods in Anglo-American kitchens well into the twentieth century, sold in fine, medium and pearl grades, and used as much for thickening soups as for the puddings they are now remembered for.