Recipe for Country Potato Soup

My husband and I ate out at one of the local restaurants this week and a new offer on the menu was Country Potato Soup. I had been a bit under the weather for the last week or so, and this was definitely a “comfort” food for me. 

I snapped a quick pic to send to my granddaughter Maggie who loves potato soup too. Since Maggie is away at college I promised to make her some potato soup the next time she comes home. 

I planned to ask for the recipe from the restaurant because this was absolutely the best potato soup I had ever eaten! We’ll see if they choose to let me have it or not. Maybe they will, and if they do, I’ll come back and share it here. In the meantime, I’ll have to resort to my old recipe or look for a new one to try.

Cooking at an Early Age

The reason I call this “comfort” food I suppose is because it dredges up old memories of what we called potato soup growing up in the South.

Like all good daughters, I learned how to cook at an early age. One of the first things I learned to cook was cornbread, kraut that mother had canned in fruit jars, stewed potatoes, and sweet tea.

If you could fix those things, it would suffice for a meal for the whole family. There were six of us at home at the time.

Oh…and I could poach eggs! Goodness, I haven’t poached an egg in 50 years now, but we lived on a farm and eggs were always plentiful. If we came in from working in the field and didn’t have anything else to fix for “dinner” (the noon meal was called dinner), we could always have poached eggs with crumbled crackers. I know, it may sound weird, but it was lunch on many occasions.

Mother didn’t usually let me cook anything that involved frying or cooking with grease except to grease the skillet for the cornbread to cook in. Cooking stewed potatoes sometimes started with going to the garden and digging up potatoes using a fork. 

Digging for Potatoes

The above image shows the potato vine pulled up out of the ground. When potatoes first started coming in, you had to go looking for them with a fork.

To dig potatoes, you would look around close to the base of the vine for areas in the earth that were cracked and start gently scratching away the dirt with the fork from there. If the potato was anywhere from 1.5 to 2″ or so, it was okay to use for stewed potatoes.

After you had gathered enough potatoes for the meal, you would replace the dirt back over the plant so the smaller potatoes or other potatoes could continue to fill out. I can still hear my mother saying “Don’t leave the fork in the garden!”

Cleaning Potatoes

To clean “new” potatoes, you rub the red skin off with a dishrag and water. Sometimes you might have to use a case knife to scrap away the skin.

So many recipes now call for using small red potatoes with the skin on…..but we would have never done that! Peeling small new potatoes would have resulted in too little potato to cook!]

Cooking the Potatoes

We would place the scrubbed, whole potatoes in a saucepan, cover them with water, and cook until tender. Once the potatoes were cooked, the excess water was drained off, leaving enough to cover the potatoes in the pan. Add butter or margarine, salt, and pepper.

Next, you would need to thicken the liquid with a couple of tablespoons of flour and a little milk. After the lumps were all stirred out, add it to the potatoes and cook for a few more minutes. Add more milk as needed if you like it thinner.

We always served stewed potatoes with cornbread. Potato soup was the thick liquid that was left after all the potatoes were gone. It never occurred to me to make “potato soup” intentionally until many years later.

Well anyway, having the Country Potato Soup at Nick’s Steakhouse got me thinking about “how we used to do it.” Now I’m on the search for Nick’s recipe or something similar. If I find a good one I’ll share it with you! Nothing like good comfort food in fall weather!

Another great soup for cold weather is homemade vegetable beef soup. Here’s a recipe that I use sometimes. Once you’ve made vegetable soup a few times, you’ll find that you never make it the same way twice, not exactly anyway)))

Great News!

Nate shared his recipe for Country Potato Soup with me! Although it wasn’t the exact measurements or anything, it was the basic ingredients.

Recipe

Frozen Diced Potatoes

Cream of Chicken Soup

Chicken Broth

Cream Cheese (softened)

Salt/Pepper/Garlic

My Take on the Soup

I used one bag of frozen hashbrown potatoes (not shredded); one can of Cream of Chicken Soup; one large container (Great Value) of chicken broth; one 8-oz block of cream cheese; salt and pepper to taste, a tiny bit of garlic, and a couple of tablespoons of butter.

Cook the potatoes in the broth and soup until tender along with seasonings. Soften the cream cheese and take some of the liquid out of the potatoes to stir into the cream cheese to make it smooth and creamy. Add the cream cheese and the butter. If it’s not thick enough to suit your taste, cream a little bit of flour with some of the liquid and add in as a thickener.

Serve with. hot cornbread! Sprinkle some grated sharp cheddar cheese on top and crumbled bacon. Serve with cornbread or crackers.

What’s one of your favorite comfort foods? Please share!

Try a chicken salad sandwich with this soup: