4 good-sized carrots, 1 small head of celery, 1 fair-sized onion, 1 turnip, 3 oz. of breadcrumbs, 1-1/2 oz. of butter, 1 blade of mace, pepper and salt to taste. Scrape and wash the vegetables, and cut them up small; set them over the fire with 3 pints of water, the butter, bread, and mace. Let all boil together, until the vegetables are quite tender, and then rub them through a sieve. Return the mixture to the saucepan, season with pepper and salt, and if too thick add water to the soup, which should be as thick as cream, boil the soup up, and serve.
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.
Cheese-cakes can be sent to table in two forms, the one some rich kind of custard or cream placed in little round pieces of pastry, or we can have a so-called cheese-cake baked in a pie-dish, the edges only of which are lined with puff paste. We can also have cheese-cakes very rich and cheese-cakes very plain. The origin of the name cheese-cake is that originally they were made from curds used in making cheese. Probably most people consider that the cheese-cakes made from curds are superior, and in the North of England, and especially in Yorkshire, where curds are exposed for sale in the windows at so much a pound, very delicious cheese- cakes can be made, but considerable difficulty will be experienced if we attempt to make home-made curds from London milk. Curds are made by taking any quantity of milk and letting it nearly boil, then throw in a little rennet or a glass of sherry. The curds must be well strained.
This is a nice dish when you require a lot of white of eggs for other purposes, such as iceing a wedding-cake, or making light vanilla or almond biscuits. Take six hard-boiled yolks, powder them, flavour with a little pepper and salt, and mix in three raw yolks; mix this well together, and roll them into shapes like very small sausages, pointed at each end like a foreign cigar. Flour these on the outside, and throw them into boiling water. These can be used for garnishing purposes for the vast majority of vegetarian dishes. They can be flavoured if wished with grated nutmeg, chopped parsley, and a few savoury herbs.
1/2 lb. of fine wheatmeal, 1/4 lb. of butter, 5 eggs, 1/2 lb. of castor sugar, 1-1/2 oz. of Allinson cocoa, 1 dessertspoonful of vanilla essence. Proceed as in recipe of "Madeira Cake," adding the cocoa and flavouring with vanilla.
4 eggs, the weight of 3 in fine wheatmeal, and the weight of 4 in castor sugar, any flavouring to taste. Beat the eggs, sift in the sugar and meal, stirring all the time, add the flavouring, and pour the mixture into one or two greased cake tins, only filling them half full. Bake in a moderate oven for about an hour, until a knitting needle comes out clean.
The juice of black currants makes excellent jelly in the ordinary way if we boil a pint of black currant juice with a pound of sugar till it sets; but a mould of black currant jelly suitable to be used as a sweet at dinner can be made by adding less sugar and thickening the juice with corn-flour, allowing about a tablespoonful to every pint, and pouring it into a mould or plain round basin. The mould can be ornamented as follows, and we will suppose a pudding-basin to be used for the purpose. We will suppose the mould of jelly to have been turned out on to a clean sheet of white paper. Pick some of the brighter green black-currant leaves off the tree, and place these round the base of the mould with the stalk of the leaf pushed underneath and the point of the leaf pointing outwards. Now choose a few very small bunches of black currants, wash these and dip them into very weak gum and water, and then dip them into white powdered sugar. They now look, when they are dry, as if they were crystallised or covered with hoar-frost. Place one of these little bunches, with the stalk stuck into the mould of jelly, about an inch from the bottom, so that each bunch rests on a green leaf. Cut a small stick of angelica and stick it into the top of the mould upright, and let a bunch of frosted black currants hang over the top. If we wish to make the mould of jelly very pretty as a supper dish, where there is a good top light, we can dip the green leaves into weak gum and water and then sprinkle over them some powdered glass.
6 oz. each of Allinson fine wheatmeal and white flour, 4-1/2 oz. of butter, 1 egg, a little cold water, 1-1/2 lbs. of apples, 1 heaped-up teaspoonful of cinnamon, and 3 oz. of castor sugar. Rub the butter into the meal and flour, beat up the egg and add it, and as much cold water as is required to make a smooth paste; roll out the greater part of it 1/4 inch thick, and line a flat buttered tin with it. Pare, core, and cut the apples into thin divisions, arrange them in close rows on the paste point down, leaving 1 inch of edge uncovered; sift the sugar and cinnamon over the apples; roll out thinly the rest of the paste, cover the apples with it, turn up the edges of the bottom crust over the edges of the top crust, make 2 incisions in the crust, and bake the cake until brown in a moderately hot oven; when cold sift castor sugar over it, slip the cake off the tin, cut into pieces, and serve.
Take an onion, carrot, small head of celery, and some turnip, and boil them till they are tender in some stock. The water in which some rice has been boiled is very well suited for the purpose. Add also to every quart a brimming tablespoonful of mixed savoury herbs. Rub the whole through a wire sieve, thicken it with brown roux till it is as thick as cream; add a few drops of Parisian essence--(sold in bottles by all grocers)--to give it a dark colour. Add a wineglassful of sherry or Madeira, or, if the use of wine be objected to, the juice of a hard lemon. Flavour the soup with a little cayenne pepper, and serve some egg forcemeat balls in it, about the size of small marbles.
1 bar of Allinson chocolate, 1/2 pint of milk, 1/2 teaspoonful of cornflour, 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla essence. Melt the chocolate over the fire with 1 tablespoonful of water, add the milk, and stir well; when it boils add the cornflour and vanilla. Boil the sauce up, and serve.
