Take four dozen chestnuts and peel them. This will be a very long process if we attempt to take off the skins while they are raw; but in order to save time and trouble, place the chestnuts in a stew-pan with a couple of ounces of butter. Place them on a slack fire and occasionally give them a stir. Heat them gradually till the husks come off without any difficulty. Having removed all the husks, add sufficient stock or water to the chestnuts, and let them boil gently till they are tender. Then pound them in a mortar and rub them through a wire sieve. Add a very little brown roux, if the soup is to be brown, and a few drops of Parisian essence (burnt sugar), or a little white roux and a little cream if the soup is to be white. Add also a little pepper and salt, sufficient butter to make the puree taste soft, and a little powdered sugar. Fried and toasted bread should be served with the soup.
Take half a dozen or more fine large leeks, and after trimming off the green part, throw them into boiling water for five minutes, then drain them off and dry them. Cut them into pieces about half an inch long, and stew them gently in a little butter till they are tender. Add three pints of milk, and let two bay-leaves boil in the milk, flavour with pepper and salt, and add a suspicion of grated nutmeg. Thicken the soup with a little white roux and take the crust of a French roll. Cut this up into small pieces or rings. The rings can be made by simply scooping out the crumb, and cutting the roll across. When the leeks have boiled in the milk till they are quite tender, pour the soup over the crusts placed at the bottom of the soup-tureen. Some cooks add blanched parsley. Of course, cream would be a great improvement.
Make a mixture of mushrooms, potatoes, &c., exactly similar to that for making a pie. Place this in a basin with only sufficient water to moisten the ingredients, cover the basin with bread-crumbs soaked in milk, and steam the basin in the ordinary way.
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.
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.
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.
In boiling beet-roots be careful not to break them, or else they will bleed and lose their colour. When the beet-root is boiled and cold, peel it, and cut it into thin slices. It can be dressed with oil and vinegar, or vinegar only, adding pepper and salt. Some persons dress beet-root with a salad-dressing in which cream is used instead of oil; but never use cream and oil. To mix cream and oil is like mixing bacon with butter.
Take half a pound of curds and press the curds in a napkin to extract the moisture. Take also six ounces of lump sugar, and rub the sugar on the outside of a couple of oranges or lemons. Dissolve this sugar in two ounces of butter made hot in a tin in the oven; mix this with the curds, with two ounces of powdered ratafias and a little grated nutmeg--about half a nutmeg to this quantity will be required; add also six yolks of eggs. Mix this well together, and fill the tartlet cases, made from puff paste, and bake them in the oven. It is often customary to place in the centre of each cheese-cake a thin strip of candied peel. As soon as the cheese-cakes are done, take them out of the oven, and if the mixture be of a bad colour finish it off with a salamander, but do not let them remain in the oven too long, so that the pastry becomes brittle and dried up. These cheese-cakes can be made on a larger scale than the ordinary one so familiar to all who have looked into a pastry-cook's window. Suppose we make them of the size of a breakfast saucer, a very rich and delicious cheese-cake can be made by adding some chopped dried cherries to the mixture. Sometimes ordinary grocer's currants are added and the ratafias omitted. Sultana raisins can be used instead of currants, and by many are much preferred. This mixture can be baked in a shallow pie-dish and time edge of the dish lined with puff paste, but cheese-cakes made from curds are undoubtedly expensive.
Take half a dozen heads of celery, or a smaller quantity if the heads of celery are very large; throw away all the green part and cut up the celery into small pieces, with one onion sliced, and place them in a frying-pan, or, better still, in an enamelled stew-pan, and stew them in a little butter, taking great care that the celery does not turn colour. Now add sufficient water or stock, and let it all boil till the celery becomes quite tender. Let it boil till it becomes a pulp, and then rub the whole through a wire sieve. Next boil separately from one to two quarts of milk according to the quantity of celery pulp, and boil a couple of bay-leaves in the milk. As soon as the milk boils add it to the celery pulp, flavour the soup with pepper and salt; serve fried or toasted bread with the soup. It is needless to say that all these white soups are greatly improved both in appearance and flavour by the addition of a little cream.
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.
