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May 25
Menu: Fish Chowder; Cucumber and Tomato Salad; Cheese Croquettes; Bakewell Pudding; Coffee Fish Chowder-1 white fish weighing 5 pounds, 4 cups potato dice, 1½ cup onion dice, 1/2 cup salt pork dice, Turnip Soup Beefsteak and Kidney Pie Potatoes Peas Lettuce Salad Caramel Trifle Coffee Turnip Soup-Take 2 pounds of peeled turnips, cut into small squares, place in a stewpan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, stir them over a quick fire, add pinch salt, 1 tablespoon flour, add 3 pints of stock, simmer gently for 1/2 hours, and pass whole through a sieve. Put back in stewpan, and add little seasoning. Bring to boil, and just before sending to table add 1 cup of good cream.
A plain white vegetable soup of the pre-blender era, built on the sequence of sweating, thickening, simmering and sieving. Two details decide whether it works: how hard you cook the turnips at the start, and how you handle the cream at the end.
- The cream goes in off the boilThe instruction to add cream "just before sending to table" is the hinge. Bring the sieved soup to a boil, take it off the heat, then stir the cream in; boiling it afterwards risks separation and dulls the fresh dairy flavour that is the whole point of the finish.
- "A quick fire"Medium-high heat. The turnips should soften and take on a little colour in the fat without browning deeply, which would tint an intentionally pale soup.
- Crisco and the alternativesFour tablespoons is a quarter cup. Modern Crisco is reformulated (no longer partially hydrogenated), and butter works at least as well here; the 1913 text is promoting the shortening as a butter and lard substitute.
- Liquid measureThree pints is 6 cups of stock. A light chicken or veal stock suits it; a heavy beef stock overwhelms turnip.
- "Simmer gently for 1/2 hours"A typographical muddle in the original. Half an hour is right for turnips cut in small squares, and is all they need to fall apart under a sieve.
- Passing through a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a fine strainer gives the same smooth result in a fraction of the time. Push everything through, solids included; the puree is the body of the soup.
- "A little seasoning"Salt and white pepper, with a scrape of nutmeg if you like it. White pepper keeps the colour clean, and turnip needs a firmer hand with salt than most root vegetables.
- YieldSix cups of stock plus a cup of cream and two pounds of sieved turnip give roughly eight cups of finished soup, serving six to eight as a first course.
The odd title reflects the layout of the book rather than the dish: this comes from a Crisco "calendar of dinners" -- a year of suggested menus in which each day's courses run together on the page -- so a coffee heading has collided with the soup dated May 27. Procter & Gamble issued such promotional cookbooks, beginning with The Story of Crisco in 1913, to teach cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening they had introduced in 1911; the recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Turnip soup itself is much older than the fat it is fried in -- a puree of a cheap root vegetable, enriched with stock and cream, of the type French cookery books catalogue among the potages purees. Its presence in a promotional cookbook is deliberate: where butter or lard once went, the new product is substituted, including the four tablespoons that start this pan.