Peanut Soup
Take one pint of shelled peanuts and one quart of boiling water and simmer until they can be rubbed through a sieve. Add one quart of milk and simmer for an hour; then stir in one tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour rubbed to a paste. When thickened, season to taste and simmer five minutes longer.
A plain milk-based purée soup from the era when peanuts were still a novelty ingredient in American kitchens. Two things decide whether it works: whether your peanuts are raw or roasted, and whether the milk is kept below a boil.
- How many peanutsA pint is a volume measure here, not a weight: roughly 10 ounces of shelled nuts. With a quart of water and a quart of milk this makes a generous quantity of fairly thin soup.
- Raw or roastedThe recipe says only 'shelled', so you must decide. Raw peanuts need long, patient simmering — expect 1 to 2 hours before they will crush through a sieve, and top up the water as it goes. Roasted unsalted peanuts break down faster and give a deeper flavor; if you use them, reduce the salt you add at the end, and skip salted cocktail nuts entirely.
- The skinsRed papery skins turn the soup a dull pink and add tannic bitterness. Rub them off after the first simmer, or use blanched peanuts from the start.
- Sieve or blender"Rubbed through a sieve" was the standard way to purée before electric machines. A blender does it in a minute; passing the result through a fine strainer afterward will catch any peanut fibre the machine leaves behind.
- The hour with the milkThis is the step that fails. A quart of milk held at a real simmer for an hour will scorch on the bottom and skin over. Keep it at a bare tremble over low heat, stir often, or set the pot in a wider pan of simmering water. The hour is for flavor, not for cooking anything, so 20 to 30 minutes is plenty.
- The thickeningOne tablespoon butter rubbed with two tablespoons flour is a beurre manié — an uncooked paste whisked in at the end. Add it in small pieces so it disperses, and give it the full five minutes of simmering afterward to lose the raw-flour taste. For two quarts of liquid this is light thickening; double it if you want a heavier soup.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means at least salt and pepper, and the soup badly needs both. A little cayenne, a grating of nutmeg, or a spoonful of sherry stirred in off the heat are all plausible period additions.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or six to eight first-course servings. It thickens considerably as it cools and will need thinning with milk or stock when reheated.
Peanut soup belongs to a strand of American cookery that runs from West Africa through the plantation South. Groundnut stews and soups are long-established across West Africa, and the peanut itself — a South American plant carried to Africa by Portuguese traders, then back across the Atlantic — arrived in Southern kitchens largely through enslaved cooks, which is why the dish is most firmly associated with Virginia and the Carolinas rather than with New England. Its appearance in a general household compendium at the turn of the twentieth century reflects a commercial shift as much as a culinary one: peanut acreage expanded sharply after the Civil War, and mechanical shelling is often credited with making cheap shelled nuts more widely available, though how far the peanut had moved by then from street-vendor snack toward pantry staple is harder to say. The recipe's method — long-simmered purée, milk, a butter-and-flour binding — is straightforwardly the standard white-soup formula of the day, with the peanut simply dropped into the slot usually filled by almonds, celery or potato.