Milk soup, as it is sometimes called in Germany, very much resembles English custard. It is made by putting a quart of milk on the fire and thickening it with two yolks of eggs and a little flour, and sweetening it with sugar. The soup is flavoured with either vanilla, lemon, laurel leaves, pounded almonds, cinnamon, chocolate, &c. As a soup, however, it is not suited to the English palate.
Just as in ordinary white soup the secret of success is to have some strongly reduced stock, so in vegetarian white soup it is essential that we should have a small quantity of liquid strongly impregnated with the flavour of vegetables. For this purpose, place an onion, the white part of a head of celery, and a slice of turnip in a stew-pan with a little butter, and fry them till they are tender without becoming brown. Now add sufficient water to enable you to boil them, and let the water boil away till very little is left. Now rub this through a wire sieve and add it to a quart of milk in which a couple of bay-leaves have been boiled. Thicken the soup with a little white roux, add a suspicion of nutmeg, and also, if possible, a little cream. Flavour with pepper and salt. Serve fried or toasted bread with the soup.
When this soup is well made it is a general favourite, but it must be well made, for it is impossible to appreciate the greasy, yellow, dish-water-looking liquid which is sometimes served in that name. Put in a saucepan 2 ozs. butter, and into that shred finely 1/2 or 1 lb. onions. Add half or more of a tin of tomatoes or about 1 lb. fresh ones sliced, and a cup of water or stock. Simmer very gently for an hour and rub through a wire sieve, pressing with the back of a wooden spoon to get all the pulp through. Everything should go through except the skin and seeds. Return to clean saucepan with stock or water, and two tablespoonfuls of tapioca, previously soaked for at least an hour. Stir till it boils and is quite clear. This soup may be varied in many ways, as by substituting for the tapioca, crushed vermicelli, ground rice, cornflour, &c. Some chopped spring onions, chives or leeks, added after straining are a great improvement, also chopped parsley, while many people like the addition of milk or cream.
Take three or four small cauliflowers, or two large ones, soak them in salt and water, and boil them in some water till they are nearly tender. Take them out and break the cauliflower so that you get two or three dozen little pieces out of the heart of the cauliflower, somewhat resembling miniature bouquets. Put the rest of the cauliflower back into the water in which it was boiled, with the exception of the green part of the leaves, with an onion and some of the white part of a head of celery. Let all boil till the water has nearly boiled away. Now rub all this through a wire sieve, onions, celery, cauliflower, and all; add to it sufficient boiling milk to make the whole of the consistency of pea soup. Add a little butter, pepper, and salt; throw in those little pieces of cauliflower that had been reserved a minute or two before serving the soup. It is an improvement to boil two or three bay-leaves with the milk, and also a very great improvement indeed to add a little boiling cream. Fried or toasted bread should be served with the soup.
1 pint of fresh vegetable, cut up in small pieces, or one can. 1 pint of boiling water. 1 pint of hot milk. 1 tablespoonful of flour. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt. 3 shakes of pepper.
After the vegetable is washed and cut in very small pieces, put it in the pint of water and cook it for twenty minutes. Or, if you use a canned vegetable, cook it ten minutes. While it is cooking, make the rule for white sauce as before: Melt one tablespoonful of butter, and when it bubbles put in one tablespoonful of flour, with the salt and pepper; shake well, and rub till smooth and thick with the hot milk. Take the vegetable from the fire and press it through the wire sieve, letting the water go through, too; mix with the sauce and strain again, and it is done.
Almost all soups are better for one very thin slice of onion cooked with the vegetable. When you want a cream soup very nice indeed, whip a cup of cream and put in the hot soup-tureen, and pour the soup in on it, beating it a little, till it is all foamy.
Cut melon in half, seed and put on ice one hour before serving. When ready to serve, fill with crushed ice and sprinkle with, powdered sugar. Allow one-half melon for each person. Very refreshing for summer luncheons or dinners. For dinner serve before soup.
To half a pint of milk put two well-beaten eggs, and as much wheat flour as will make a smooth, rather thick batter free from lumps; drop this batter, a tablespoonful at a time, into boiling soup. Another Mode.--One cupful of sour cream and one cupful of sour milk, three eggs, well beaten, whites and yolks separately; one teaspoonful of salt, one level teaspoonful of soda, dissolved in a spoonful of water, and enough flour added to make a very stiff batter. To be dropped by spoonfuls into the broth and boiled twenty minutes, or until no raw dough shows on the outside.
A quart of milk, six large potatoes, one stalk of celery, an onion and a table-spoonful of butter. Put milk to boil with onion and celery. Pare potatoes and boil thirty minutes. Turn off the water, and mash fine and light. Add boiling milk and the butter, and pepper and salt to taste. Rub through a strainer and serve immediately. A cupful of whipped cream, added when in the tureen, is a great improvement. This soup must not be allowed to stand, not even if kept hot. Served as soon as ready, it is excellent.
Like most soups that are either sweet or sour, this is a German recipe. Put a piece of butter, the size of a large egg, into a saucepan. Let it melt, then mix it with a tablespoonful of flour, and stir smoothly until it is lightly browned. Add gradually two pints of water, a pound of black cherries, picked and washed, and a few cloves. Let these boil until the fruit is quite tender, then press the whole through a sieve. After straining, add a little port, if wine is allowed--but the soup will be very nice without this addition--half a teaspoonful of the kernels, blanched and bruised, a tablespoonful of sugar, and a few whole cherries. Let the soup boil again until the cherries are tender, and pour all into a tureen over toasted sippets, sponge-cakes, or macaroons.
Ices are too often regarded as expensive luxuries, and show how completely custom rules the majority of our housekeepers. There are many houses where the dinner may consist daily of soup, fish, entrees, joint, game, and wine, and yet, were we to suggest a course of ices, the worthy housekeeper would hesitate on the ground of extravagance. It is difficult to argue with persons whose definition of economy is what they have always been accustomed to since they were children, and whose definition of extravagance is anything new. The fact remains, however, that there is many a worthy signor who sells ices in the streets at a penny each, and manages to make a living out of the profit not only for himself, but for his signora as well. Under these circumstances, the manufacture of these "extravagances" is worthy of inquiry. Ices can be made at home very cheaply with an ice machine, which can now be obtained at a, comparatively speaking, small cost. With a machine there is absolutely no trouble, and directions will be given with each machine, so that any details here, which vary with the machine, will be useless. Ices can be made at home without a machine with a little trouble, and, to explain how to do this, it is necessary to explain the theory of ice-making, which is exceedingly simple. We will not allude to machines dependent on freezing-powders, but to those which rely for their cold simply on ice and salt mixed. We will suppose we want a lemon-water ice, i.e., we have made some very strong and sweet lemonade, and we want to freeze it. It is well known that water will freeze at a certain temperature, called freezing-point. By mixing chopped ice and salt and a very little water together, a far greater degree of cold can be immediately produced, viz., a thermometer would stand at 32 degrees below freezing-point were it to be plunged into this mixture. An ice machine is a metal pail placed in another pail much larger than itself. The "sweet lemonade" is placed in the middle pail, and chopped ice and salt placed outside it. The proportion of ice to salt should be double the weight of the former to the latter. It is now obvious that if we have filled two pails, the one with "the sweet lemonade," and the other with the ice and salt, very soon our lemonade will be a solid block of ice. To prevent this it must be constantly stirred, and, as the lemonade would of course freeze first against the sides of the pail, these sides must be constantly scraped. Inside the inner pail, consequently, there is a stirrer, which, by means of a handle, continually scrapes the side of the pail. It is obvious that if the stirrer is fixed, and the pail itself made to revolve, that is the same as if the pail were fixed and the stirrer made to revolve. To make lemon-water ice, therefore, place the lemonade in the inner pail, surrounded with chopped ice and salt, two parts of the former to one of the latter, turn the handle, and in a few minutes the ice is made. Now, suppose you have not got a machine, proceed as follows: Take an empty, clean, round coffee-tin (the larger the better). [We mention coffee-tin as the most probable one to be in the house, but any round tin will do.] Get a clean piece of wood, the same width as the inside diameter of the tin, only it must be a great deal longer. We will suppose the tin rather more than a foot deep and five inches in diameter. Our piece of wood, which should be clean and smooth, must be nearly five inches wide, say a quarter of an inch thick, and about two feet long. Next get a small tub, say nine inches deep, place the round tin in the middle, with the sweet lemonade inside; next place the piece of wood upright in the tin, so that the wood touches the bottom. Next surround the tin with chopped ice and salt up to the edge of the tub, fill it as high as you can, and then cover it round with a blanket, i.e., cover the ice and salt. Now get someone to hold the wooden board steady; take the tin in your two hands, and turn it round and round, first one way and then another. In a very short time you will find the tin to contain lemon-water ice. The following hints, rather than recipes, for making ices, i.e., for making the liquid, which must be frozen as directed above, are given, not because they are the best recipes, but because cream, which is the basis of all first-class ices, is often too expensive to be used constantly. Of course, real cream is far superior to any substitute.
