Home › A Calendar of Dinners › June 20
June 20
Menu: Cream of Cucumber Soup; Grilled Salmon, Mayonnaise Sauce; Lamb Cutlets; Green Peas Mashed Potatoes; Cold Fruit Souffle; Coffee Cream of Cucumber Soup-2 large cucumbers, 8 onions, sprig parsley, handful spinach, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 quart white stock, 1 cup milk, 2 cups cream, 2 yolks eggs, nutmeg, 1 teaspoon sugar, pepper and salt to taste, croutons. Peel cucumbers and cut firm part into dice, about 3 tablespoons; boil gently in salted water until soft, drain and reserve for soup. Cut remainder cucumber into pieces, cut onions small. Make Crisco hot in stewpan, fry onions and cucumber 5 minutes, add parsley with stock, let it simmer 20 minutes. Mix cornstarch with milk, stir in soup until it boils, let boil 10 minutes. Well wash and drain spinach, pound it in mortar, turn it into cloth and squeeze lightly as possible. Pour as much of this liquor into soup as will make it a delicate green color. Pass soup through sieve, turn it back into stewpan. Mix cream and yolks of eggs in basin, pour boiling soup on to them, stirring at same time, return to pan; it must not boil again or it will curdle. Season to taste with nutmeg, pepper, and salt. Cut bread into dice, fry pale color in hot Crisco, drain and toss them in sugar, sprinkle little red pepper over and place in oven 2 minutes. Warm dice of cucumber, put them in tureen with croutons and pour hot soup over and serve.
A full-dress cream soup in the old French manner: vegetable base, cornstarch binding, spinach juice for colour, egg-yolk liaison at the end. Most of the work is in the last three minutes.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the cream and yolks go in, the soup must not return to a boil or the yolks scramble and the texture breaks. Pour the boiling soup onto the yolk mixture in a steady stream while whisking, then return it to the pan; the recipe asks for no further cooking, and if you do warm it, keep it well below a simmer (yolks set from about 175-180F).
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Two tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat works for sweating the vegetables; butter is better here and will not fight the cream. Same for frying the croutons.
- Eight onionsThe recipe gives no size or weight; eight onions to a quart of stock only makes sense if they were small, and two medium modern onions is a reasonable reading of the intent.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted, so the finished soup stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; the recipe salts at the end for good reason.
- Spinach juiceThis is the period method for green colouring without flavour: the pounded raw leaves give a bright liquor that is added off the strongest heat. Add it after the cornstarch has finished boiling and only until the colour is right, since prolonged heat turns it grey-brown. A blender and a fine sieve or cloth do the pounding faster.
- CucumbersTwo large cucumbers, peeled. The firm flesh is diced (about three tablespoons) and boiled separately as a garnish; the rest, seeds and all, goes into the base and is sieved out. Cook the garnish dice only until tender, then warm them again for the tureen.
- The croutonsFried bread dice tossed in sugar, sprinkled with a little red pepper (cayenne), and given two minutes in the oven to set the coating; the book gives no temperature. Unusual now, but the sweet-hot crunch is the point of contrast against the cream; make them last so they stay crisp.
- YieldA quart of stock, a cup of milk and two cups of cream is about seven cups of liquid before the vegetables and reduction, so expect somewhat under two quarts finished; the recipe gives no serving count. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in.
Cream of cucumber soup belongs to the elaborate American dinner-party menus of the 1900s and 1910s, when a pale, sieved, egg-enriched pur e was was the expected opening course and such soups were sometimes tinted green with spinach liquor rather than left a dull grey. This version comes from the Crisco cookery literature Procter & Gamble published from 1913 onward to introduce the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening co history and recipes in The Story of Crisco, and dated menus with recipes in the companion A Calendar of Dinners. The commercial motive is plain, but the cooking is orthodox for the period, and the sugared cayenne croutons are a reminder of how freely late-Victorian and Edwardian kitchens mixed sweet with hot in garnishes.