The Belgian Cookbook | Page 4

cleaning four potatoes, two leeks, a celery, four carrots, three pounds of big tomatoes; well wash all these vegetables and cut them in dice, the tomatoes a little larger. Cook them all gently for an hour in nearly two pints of gravy, to which you have already added two thick slices of bread and a pinch of salt. Take care that your vegetables do not stick to the bottom of the pan. When all is well cooked, pass it through a fine tammy. Add more gravy, or water and meat juice; make it of the consistency that you wish. Bring it to the boil again over the fire, adding pepper and salt, and just before serving a bit of fresh butter also. It is a great improvement to add at the last minute the yolk of an egg, mixed in a little cold water, quickly stirred in when the soup is off the fire.
The three recipes for seven or eight persons.
[G. Kerckaert.]
ONION SOUP
Mince some thick onions, five or six, and let them color over the fire in butter. Add a dessert-spoonful of flour, sprinkling it in, and the same amount in gravy; thicken it with potatoes and when these are cooked, peas, all through a sieve. Bring the pur��e to the right consistency with milk, and let it simmer for a few minutes before serving, adding pepper and salt.
[Gabrielle Janssens.]
POTAGE LEMAN
Make a good gravy with one and one-half pounds of skirt of beef. With one half of the gravy make a very good pur��e of peas--if possible the green peas--with the other half make a good pur��e of tomatoes. Combine the two pur��es, adding pepper and salt and a dust of cayenne. For each guest add to the soup a teaspoonful of Madeira wine, beat it all well and serve quickly. Or add, instead of Madeira, one dessert-spoonful of sherry wine.
This celebrated soup is honored by the name of the glorious defender of Namur.
[Gabrielle Janssens.]
TOMATO SOUP
Boil together six medium potatoes, a celery, two leeks, two carrots, and a pound of fresh tomatoes, with pepper, salt and a leaf of bay. Pass all through the sieve. Fry two or three chopped onions in some butter and add the soup to them. Boil up again for twenty minutes before serving. If you have no fresh tomatoes, the tinned ones can be used, removing the skin, at the same time that you add the fried onions.
[Mme. van Praet.]
SOUP, CREAM OF ASPARAGUS
Boil some potatoes and pass them through the sieve, add the asparagustops, with a pat of butter for each four tops; thin the soup with extract of meat and water, and at the last moment stir in the raw yolks of two eggs, and a little chopped parsley.
[Mme. van Praet.]
GREEN PEA SOUP
Put half a pound of dry green peas to soak overnight in water, with a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda in it. In the morning take out the peas and put them on the fire in about three-and-a-half pints of water. When the peas are nearly cooked, add five big potatoes. When all is cooked enough for the skins to come off easily, rub all through a sieve. Fry in some butter four or five onions and five or six leeks till they are brown, or, failing butter, use some fat of beef; add these to the peas and boil together a good half-hour. If possible, add a pig's trotter cut into four, which makes the soup most excellent. When ready to serve, remove the four pieces of trotter. Little dice of fried bread should be handed with the soup.
[V. Verachtert.]
VEGETABLE SOUP
Fry four onions till they are brown. Add them to three pints of water, with four carrots, a slice of white crumb of bread, five potatoes, a celery and a bunch of parsley, which you must take out before passing the soup through the sieve. A few tomatoes make the soup better; if they are tinned, do not add them till after the soup has been passed through the tammy; if they are fresh, put them in with the other vegetables. Simmer for an hour, add pepper and salt before serving.
[V. Verachtert.]
MUSHROOM CREAM SOUP
On a good white stock foundation, for which you have used milk and a bone of veal, sprinkle in some ground rice till it thickens, stirring it well for twenty minutes. Wash and chop your mushrooms, and fry them in butter. Add the yolk of an egg and bind it. This is a delicious soup.
[Mme. van Marcke de Lunessen.]
THE SOLDIER'S VEGETABLE SOUP
(Eight to ten persons)
Peel three pounds of vegetables. Put them in a large pot with all the vegetables that you can find, according to the season. In the winter you will take four celeries, four leeks, two turnips, a cabbage, two onions, pepper and salt, two-penny-worth of