Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches | Page 9

so that it may not be necessary to replenish it: this soup being always made very rich. Let it boil slowly four hours, skimming it carefully. As soon as no more scum rises, put in six potatoes, and three?turnips, all sliced thin; with equal proportions of parsley, sweet marjoram and sweet basil, chopped fine; and pepper and salt to your taste.
An hour before you send the meat to table, make about two dozen small force-meat balls of minced veal and beef-suet in equal quantities, seasoned with pepper and salt; sweet herbs, grated lemon-peel, and powdered nutmeg and mace. Add some beaten yolk of egg to make all these ingredients stick together. Flour the balls very well, and fry them in butter. Before you put them into the soup, take out the head, and the other meat. Cut the meat from the head in small pieces, and return it to the soup. When the soup is nearly done, stir in half a pint of Madeira. Have ready at least a dozen egg-balls made of the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, grated or pounded in a mortar, and mixed with a little flour and sufficient raw yolk of egg to bind them. Make them up into the form and size of boy's marbles. Throw them into the soup at the last, and also squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Let it get another slow boil, and then put it into the tureen.
We omit a receipt for real turtle soup, as when that very expensive, complicated, and difficult dish is prepared in a private family, it is advisable to hire a first-rate cook for the express purpose.
An easy way is to get it ready made, in any quantity you please, from a turtle-soup house.
OX TAIL SOUP
Three ox tails will make a large tureen full of soup. Desire the butcher to divide them at the joints. Rub them with salt, and put them to soak in warm water, while you prepare the vegetables. Put into a large pot or stew-pan four onions peeled and quartered, a bunch of parsley, two sliced carrots, two sliced turnips, and two dozen pepper corns. Then put in the tails, and pour on three quarts of water.
Cover the pot, and set it on hot coals by the side of the fire. Keep it gently simmering for about three hours, supplying it well with fresh hot coals. Skim it carefully. When the meat is quite tender, and falls from the bones, strain the soup into another pot, and add to it a spoonful of mushroom catchup, and two?spoonfuls of butter rubbed in flour.
You may thicken it also with the pulp of a dozen onions first fried soft, and then rubbed through a cullender. After it is thickened, let it just boil up, and then send it to table, with small squares of toasted bread in the tureen.
OCHRA SOUP.
Take a large slice of ham (cold boiled ham is best) and two pounds of the lean of fresh beef; cut all the meat into small pieces. Add a quarter of a pound of butter slightly melted; twelve large tomatas pared and cut small; five dozen ochras cut into slices not thicker than a cent; and salt and cayenne pepper to your taste. Put all these ingredients into a pot; cover them with boiling water, and let them stew slowly for an hour. Then add three quarts of hot water, and increase the heat so as to make the soup boil. Skim it well, and stir it frequently with a wooden or silver spoon.
Boil it till the tomatas are all to pieces, and the ochras?entirely dissolved. Strain it, and then serve it up with toasted bread cut into dice, put in after it comes out of the pot.
This soup will be improved by a pint of shelled Lima beans, boiled by themselves, and put into the tureen just before you send it to table.
BEAN SOUP.
Put two quarts of dried white beans into soak the night before you make the soup, which should be put on as early in the day as possible.
Take five pounds of the lean of fresh beef--the coarse pieces will do. Cut them up, and put them into your soup-pot with the bones belonging to them, (which should be broken to pieces,) and a pound of bacon cut very small. If you have the remains of a piece of beef that has been roasted the day before, and so much under-done that the juices remain in it, you may put it into the pot, and its bones along with it. Season the meat with pepper and salt, and pour on it six quarts of water. As soon as it boils take off the scum, and put in the beans (having first drained them) and a head of celery cut small,