Take ten carrots, two onions, one leek, five potatoes, and cook all gently in water, with salt and pepper; when they are tender, rub them through the sieve and serve it very hot. [G. Goffaux.]
Brown three tablespoons of flour with one tablespoon of sweet drippings, add a small onion finely chopped, then cover the spider and let the onion steam for a little while; do this over a low heat so there will be no danger of the union getting too brown; add vinegar and soup stock and two tablespoons of sugar. Let this boil until the sauce is of the right consistency. Serve with spaetzlen made according to the foregoing recipe, using water in place of the milk to form the dough. Pour the sauce over the spaetzlen before serving. By adding more sugar the sauce may be made sweet sour.
The materials needed are fifty round clams (quahogs), a large bowl of salt pork cut up fine, the same of onions finely chopped, and the same (or more, if you desire) of potatoes cut into eighths or sixteenths of original size; wash the clams very thoroughly and put them in a pot with half a pint of water; when the shells are open they are done; then take them from the shells and chop fine, saving all the clam water for the chowder; fry out the pork very gently, and when the scraps are a good brown take them out and put in the chopped onions to fry; they should be fried in a frying pan, and the chowder kettle be made very clean before they are put in it, or the chowder will burn. (The chief secret in chowder-making is to fry the onions so delicately that they will be missing in the chowder.) Add a quart of hot water to the onions; put in the clams, clam-water and pork scraps. After it boils, add the potatoes, and when they are cooked, the chowder is finished. Just before it is taken up, thicken it with a cup of powdered crackers, and add a quart of fresh milk. If too rich, add more water. No seasoning is needed but good black pepper. With the addition of six sliced tomatoes, or half a can of the canned ones, this is the best recipe of this kind, and is served in many of our best restaurants. New Bedford Recipe.
Proceed as in the above recipe in every respect, substituting dried green peas for ordinary yellow split peas. Colour the soup green by adding a large handful of spinach before it is rubbed through the wire sieve, or add a small quantity of spinach extract (vegetable colouring sold by grocers in bottles); dried mint and fried or toasted bread should be served with the soup, as with the other.
The butcher should chop the bones very small. Cut the meat across in several places, lay it in a very clean stock pot, cover well with cold water, and bring to the boil slowly; put in a dessertspoonful of salt, and skim very carefully; draw away from the fire, place it where it will boil steadily, put in 2 dozen white peppercorns, one onion stuck with six cloves, and a fagot of herbs. This is made with a sprig each of parsley, marjoram, and thyme, tied up with a bay or peach leaf; boil steadily for six hours, and strain off.
This is the foundation for the best white soups and sauces; it is also a very nutritious broth for invalids. The meat can be made hot again in about half a pint of the stock and served with parsley butter sauce. A recipe for this is given with the sauces.
Boil the peas as before directed till they are quite tender, then strain them off and put them in a stew-pan with one ounce of butter to every quart of peas and toss them lightly about with a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Add to each quart of peas a quarter of a pint of cream and a dessertspoonful of powdered sugar; surround the dish with fried or toasted bread. LENTILS.--Lentils are, comparatively speaking, a novel form of food in this country, though they have been used abroad for many years, and a recipe for cooking them will be found in a well-known work, published in Paris in 1846, entitled "La Cuisiniere de la Campagne et de la Ville; ou, Nouvelle Cuisine Economique," one of the most popular French cookery-books ever published, and which in that year had reached a circulation of 80,000 copies. Recipes for boiled lentils and lentil soup are given in "Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery," published in 1875; but it is stated in the introductory remarks that lentils are little used in England except as food for pigeons, and adds, "They are seldom offered for sale." Since that date lentils have become an exceedingly popular form of food in many households, and vegetarians generally regard them as one of the most nourishing forms of food served at the table. There are two kinds of lentils, the German and Egyptian. The Egyptian are red and much smaller than the German, which are green. The former kind are generally used on the Continent, in Italy and the South of France, while, as the name implies, the green lentils are more commonly used in Eastern Europe. Either kind, however, can be used for making soup and puree, recipes of which have already been given, as well as for the recipes in the present chapter.
