Onion Soup
Use as much water as you have of pulp and twice as much milk (or all milk if you wish it richer) and thickening in the proportion of one tablespoonful of butter and one tablespoonful of flour to each quart. These proportions will hold good for all vegetable soups of this character. The flavor and finish of these legume soups may be varied at will by the addition of chopped and browned vegetables, dried sweet herbs, a clove or blade of mace.
This entry is written as a formula rather than a list, and it assumes you have already boiled and sieved your onions — the preceding soup entries in the book supply that step. Read it as a ratio you can scale to whatever quantity of onion pulp you have.
- Start with the pulpThe entry assumes the onions are already cooked and sieved. Peel and slice your onions, simmer them in just enough water to cover until completely soft, then press pulp and liquid through a sieve or blend smooth. That purée plus its cooking water is the "pulp" the recipe begins from; the recipe itself sets no quantity, so work from whatever amount you have.
- The proportions, worked outEqual parts water and pulp, then milk at twice that again. The original does not make clear whether "twice as much" means twice the water or twice the pulp and water together: on the wider reading, 2 cups of pulp and 2 cups of water take 8 cups of milk, for 3 quarts; on the narrower, 4 cups of milk, for 2 quarts. Either is a large yield by modern standards, so scale down to suit.
- Butter and flourOne tablespoon each per quart of finished soup is a very light thickening — the result is a thin, drinkable soup, not a chowder. Cook the flour in the butter for two or three minutes before adding liquid so it does not taste raw, and whisk the hot liquid in gradually.
- Milk needs watchingWith this much dairy and no stock, the soup scorches easily. Keep it below a simmer once the milk goes in and stir the bottom of the pan; a heavy-based pot is worth using.
- "Legume soups"The author uses legume in the older, broader sense of vegetable or garden produce, not strictly beans and peas. The formula is offered as a template for any sieved-vegetable cream soup — celery, carrot, dried pea.
- A blade of maceMace is the aril, the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece, somewhere around a quarter to a half teaspoon ground. Add it and any whole clove to the milk as it heats and fish them out before serving.
- Browned vegetablesThe recipe offers "chopped and browned vegetables" as one of several optional flavourings to be added, alongside dried sweet herbs, a clove or mace. Browning them in butter before they go in gives more depth than adding them plain.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified in this entry. Season at the end — the milk mutes salt, and this soup will take more than it seems to.
Onion soup in a book of this kind is often the milk-thickened sort rather than the beef-broth-and-cheese version of Parisian cooking; the gratinut though it is hard to say from the entry alone how familiar the gratin ed version would have been to readers of English-language household books. What is more telling here is the format. Domestic-science writing was, in this period, moving away from dish-by-dish narration toward stated proportions a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour per quart that a cook could apply to any vegetable. That impulse is generally traced to the cooking-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s, which treated the kitchen as a place where rules could be taught once and repeated, and it may be why this entry ends by telling you it will "hold good for all vegetable soups of this character."