Take a pint of split peas and put them in soak overnight in some cold water, and throw away those that float, as this shows that there is a hole in them which would be mildewy. Take two onions, a carrot, a small head of celery, and boil them with the peas in from three pints to two quarts of water till they are tender. This will be from four to five hours. When the peas are old and stale even longer time should be allowed. Then rub the whole through a wire sieve, put the soup back into the saucepan, and stir it while you make it hot or it will burn. In ordinary cookery, pea soup is invariably made from some kind of greasy stock, more especially the water in which pickled pork has been boiled. In the present instance we have no kind of fat to counteract the natural dryness of the pea-flour. We must therefore add, before sending to table, two or three ounces of butter. It will be found best to dissolve the butter in the saucepan before adding the soup to be warmed up, as it is then much less likely to stick to the bottom of the saucepan and burn. Fried or toasted bread should be served with the soup separately, as well as dried and powdered mint. The general mistake people make is, they do not have sufficient mint.
Potato soup is a very good method of using up the remains of cold boiled potatoes. Slice up a large onion and fry it, without letting it turn colour, with a little butter. Add a little water or stock to the frying-pan, and let the onion boil till it is tender. Boil a quart or more of milk separately with a couple of bay-leaves; rub the onion with the cold potatoes through a wire sieve and add it to the milk. You can moisten the potatoes in the sieve with the milk. When you have rubbed enough to make the soup thick enough, let it boil up and add to every quart a saltspoonful of thyme and a brimming teaspoonful of chopped blanched parsley. This soup should be rather thicker than most thick soups. When new potatoes first come into season, and especially when you have new potatoes from your own garden, it will often be found that mixed with the ordinary ones there are many potatoes no bigger than a toy marble, and which are too small to be boiled and sent to table as an ordinary dish of new potatoes. Reserve all these little dwarf potatoes, wash them, and throw them for five or ten minutes into boiling water, drain them off and throw them into the potato soup whole. Of course they must boil in the soup till they are tender. A little cream is a great improvement to the soup, and dried mint can be served with it, but is not absolutely necessary.
We will describe how to make a small quantity, which is always best when we make experiments. Take half a pound of the best Vienna flour, and mix with it, while dry, about a salt-spoonful of baking-powder. Now add about a tablespoonful of olive oil, and work the oil and flour together with the fingers exactly as you work a small piece of butter into the flour at the commencement of making puff paste. Next add sufficient water to make the whole into an elastic paste; roll it out and let it set between two tins containing ice, similar to the method used in making high-class pastry. We have mentioned a tablespoonful of oil, but if ice is used more oil may be added. We all know that oil will freeze at a much lower temperature than water, consequently the minute particles of oil become partially solid. Now take the paste, roll it out, and give it three turns; roll it out again, give it three more turns, and put it back in the ice; let it stand ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, and repeat this process three times. Be careful to flour the pastry each time before it is turned. By this means we get the pastry in thin layers, with minute air bubbles between them, and this will cause the pastry to rise. If you are making a pie, roll out the pastry the last time, cover the pie, and put it in the oven immediately, while the pastry is cold. Do not let the pastry stand, unless it be in a very cold place. This pastry we have just described, made with oil, can also be utilised for puddings, in which latter case we would recommend the addition of a little more baking-powder, and to every pound of flour add two tablespoonfuls of very fine bread-crumbs. These must be dry, and rubbed through a fine sieve.
This is the most important of all the sauces with which we have to deal. The great mistake made by the vast majority of women cooks is that they will use milk. They thicken a pint of milk with a little butter and flour, and then call it melted butter, and, as a rule, send to table enough for twenty persons when only two or three are dining. As butter sauce will be served with the majority of vegetables, we would call the attention of vegetarians to the fact that, as a rule, ordinary cookery-books take for granted that vegetables will be served with the meat. When therefore vegetables are served separately, and are intended to be eaten with bread as a course by themselves, some alteration must be made in the method of serving them. Again, vegetarians should bear in mind that, except in cases where poverty necessitates rigid economy, a certain amount of butter may be considered almost a necessity, should the meal be wished to be both wholesome and nourishing. Francatelli, who was chef-de-cuisine to the Earl of Chesterfield, and was also chief cook to the Queen and chef at the Reform Club, and afterwards manager of the Freemasons' Tavern, in writing on this subject observes:--"Butter sauce, or, as it is more absurdly called, melted butter, is the foundation of the whole of the following sauces, and requires very great care in its preparation. Though simple, it is nevertheless a very useful and agreeable sauce when properly made. So far from this being usually the case, it is too generally left to assistants to prepare, as an insignificant matter; the result is therefore seldom satisfactory. When a large quantity of butter sauce is required, put four ounces of fresh butter into a middle-sized stew-pan, with some grated nutmeg and minionette pepper; to these add four ounces of sifted flour, knead the whole well together, and moisten with a pint of cold spring water; stir the sauce on the fire till it boils, and after having kept it gently boiling for twenty minutes (observing that it be not thicker than the consistency of common white sauce), proceed to mix in one pound and a half of sweet fresh butter, taking care to stir the sauce quickly the whole time of the operation. Should it appear to turn oily, add now and then a spoonful of cold spring water; finish with the juice of half a lemon, and salt to palate; then pass the sauce through a tammy into a large bain-marie for use." We have quoted the recipe of the late M. Francatelli in full, as we believe it is necessary to refer to some very great authority in order to knock out the prejudice from the minds of many who think that they not only can themselves cook, but teach others, but who are bound in the chains of prejudice and tradition which, too often, in the most simple recipes, lead them to follow in the footsteps of their grandmothers. Real butter sauce can be made as follows, on a small scale:--Take a claret-glass of water, and about a small teaspoonful of flour mixed with rather more than the same quantity of butter, and mix this in the water over the fire till it is of the consistency of very thin gruel. If it is thicker than this, add a little more water. Now take any quantity of butter, and gradually dissolve as much as you can in this thin gruel, adding say half an ounce at a time, till the sauce becomes a rich oily compound. After a time, if you add too much butter, the sauce will curdle and turn oily, as described by Francatelli. Of course, in everyday life it is not necessary to have the butter sauce so rich, still it is simply ridiculous to thicken a pint of milk, or a pint of water, with a little butter and flour, and then call it butter sauce or melted butter. Suppose we have a large white cabbage, like those met with in the West of England, and we are going to make a meal off it in conjunction with plenty of bread. Suppose the cabbage is sufficiently large for six persons, surely half a pound of butter is not an excessive quantity to use in making butter sauce for the purpose. Yet prejudice is such that if we use half a pound of butter for the butter sauce, housekeepers consider it extravagant. On the other hand, if the butter were placed on the table, and the six persons helped themselves, and ate bread and butter with the cabbage and finished the half-pound, it would not be considered extravagant. Of course, this is simply prejudice. A simple way of making melted butter is as follows:--Take half a pint of cold water, put it in a saucepan, and add sufficient white roux, or butter and flour mixed, till it is of the consistency of thin gruel. Now gradually dissolve in this, adding a little piece at a time, as much butter as you can afford; add a suspicion of nutmeg, a little pepper and salt, and a few drops of lemon-juice from a fresh lemon, if you have one in use.
2 bunches of leeks, 1-1/2 pints of milk, 1 oz. of butter, 1 lb. of potatoes, pepper and salt to taste, and the juice of a lemon. Cut off the coarse part of the green ends of the leeks, and cut the leeks lengthways, so as to be able to brush out the grit. Wash the leeks well, and see no grit remains, then cut them in short pieces. Peel, wash, and cut up the potatoes, then cook both vegetables with 2 pints of water. When the vegetables are quite tender, rub them through a sieve. Return the mixture to the saucepan, add the butter, milk, and seasoning, and boil the soup up again. Before serving add the lemon juice; serve with sippets of toast.
Large white-heart cherries form a very delicate dish when stewed. Very little water should be added, and the syrup should be kept as white as possible, and, if necessary, strained. Stew the cherries till they are tender, but do not let them break. Colour the syrup with a few drops of cochineal, and add a glass of maraschino.
2 oz. of breadcrumbs, 6 oz. of boiled and grated potatoes, 1 gill of milk, 2 eggs, some Allinson fine wheatmeal 1/4 teaspoonful of nutmeg, 3 finely chopped onions, 2 handfuls of spinach, 1 handful of parsley, 1 ditto of lettuce, all chopped fine. Soak the breadcrumbs in the milk, add the potatoes, eggs well beaten, all the vegetables and seasoning; mix sufficient of the wheatmeal with the rest to make the mixture into a fairly firm paste, form this into balls, drop these in boiling clear soup or water (according to requirements), and boil them for 5 to 10 minutes.
3 oz. of rice, 4 oz. of grated cheese, a breakfastcupful of tomato juice, 1 oz. of butter, pepper and salt to taste. Boil the rice till tender in 2-1/2 pints of water, with the butter and seasoning. When quite soft, add the tomato juice and the cheese; stir until the soup boils and the cheese is dissolved, and serve. If too much of the water has boiled away, add a little more.
Boil or steam potatoes in their skins; when soft, peel and slice them. Make a sauce of milk, thickened with Allinson fine wheatmeal, and season with pepper and salt. Let the potatoes simmer in the sauce for 10 minutes. Before serving mix into the sauce a spoonful of finely chopped parsley.
Scrub and wash as many carrots as are required. Cook them in a little water or steam them until quite tender, then slice them and place them in a saucepan. Make a white sauce as directed in the recipe for "Onions and white sauce," and stir into it a handful of finely-chopped parsley. Pour the sauce over the carrots, and let them simmer for ten minutes. Serve very hot with baked potatoes.
