Celebrate Autumn with 6-ingredient Soup-kettle Supper

This school year we are featuring recipes from cookbooks located in the UW-Stout Archives Special Collections. The Special Collections are older, more rare, or Stout related books that were originally located in the UW-Stout Library’s main stacks collection. This past year we added a wealth of cookbooks to the special collections, and I scoured the shelves to find new recipes to try that would make cooking from home fun, affordable, and easy.

What better way is there to enjoy a crisp Autumn day than by cooking an easy and hearty soup recipe. Try 6-ingredient Soup-kettle Supper from Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, Souvenir Edition, 1965, TX715 .B487. This cookbook features recipes from the Better Homes and Gardens Test Kitchen from ca. 1945-1965. It is a one-stop shop for planning, prepping, cooking, and entertaining. It was designed as a binder cookbook divided into categories with helpful side tabs, for example: Meal-Planning and nutrition, desserts, canning and freezing, casseroles and one-dish meals, outdoor cooking, and table settings and entertaining. 

Take a closer look at this cookbook on the In the Vintage Kitchen Shop website: https://shopinthevintagekitchen.com/products/better-home-and-gardens-new-cook-book-1965-souvenir-edition-gold-binder

Look for more fun recipes and cooking tips on the Better Homes and Gardens website: https://www.bhg.com/recipes/

Soup-kettle Supper, p. 224

1 can condensed cream of vegetable soup

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup

1 can condensed onion soup

1 ½ cups milk

1 12 ounce can (1 ½ cups) whole kernel corn

1 4 ounce can Vienna sausage

Mix soups together; stir in milk and corn. Slice sausage links in coins, add. Cover and heat slowly, stirring occasionally till soup comes just to boiling. Makes 6 servings.

This soup recipe is pretty straight forward – basically dump everything into your pot, stir, and heat on the stove. I think you could make as little or as much as you want – use only half the ingredients or double the batch. I also think sizes of cans for some ingredients are made bigger now than back in the 1950s-1970s, there are more varieties to choose from, and some ingredients are not made anymore, as I have learned the past few years in my archives recipe cooking journey. For this recipe I used a 15 ounce can of corn vs. a 12 ounce can, and I did not find a can of Vienna sausage in my brief search at the grocery store. I used a 12-ounce Hillshire Farm ring of Beef Smoked Sausage that I cut up, that just needed to be heated up to serve. I also do not cook often with canned ingredients – the items mixed together looked a little random and weird together. Once the soup was mixed together and heated, it did taste pretty good. I would suggest adding a little seasoning for taste and color – the soup looks a little on the beige side – but don’t let that scare you from tasting it! Happy Cooking! 

Prepping the 6 ingredients

If you are looking for other tasty soup recipes to try, check out these Potato soup and Chili recipes from our Stout’s Favorites cookbooks, available via the Internet Archive:

Potato Soup, Stout’s Favorites, p. 34:

https://archive.org/details/StoutsFavoritesFirstEdition/page/n35/mode/2up

Country Potato Soup, Stout’s Favorites, 2^nd ed., p. 34:

https://archive.org/details/StoutsFavoritesSecondEdition/page/n35/mode/2up

Chili, Stout’s Favorites, 2^nd ed., p. 29:

https://archive.org/details/StoutsFavoritesSecondEdition/page/n29/mode/2up

By: Julie Hatfield, Archives Assistant, UW-Stout Archives