Harper's cook book encyclopædia

Apricot Soup, or Bouillon. — Open, crack the stones, and take out the kernels. Place the fruit with the kernels over a clear fire, and allow them to simmer, constantly stirring, until reduced to a jam. Place a colander over your soup-tureen, and, with the aid of a silver spoon, work the pulp through until nothing remains but the skins of the fruit. If a large tureen, half fill with undiluted red wine, adding enough sugar to sweeten, and some crushed cinna- Asparagus Soup Beef-tea mon. If this soup should be too thin and clear, thicken it with a little corn -starch, and add some bits of toast fried in butter. Asparagus Soup. — Cut the tops from the asparagus, and boil the rest ; rub through a sieve, adding a little salt ; warm three pints of soup stock, add a small lump of butter, then add the asparagus pulp. Boil slowly a quarter of an hour, stirring in two or three table-spoonfuls of cream ; color the soup with a teaspoonful of spinach crushed in a mortar, to which add a little water, and, squeezing the juice through a cloth, put it over a good fire. As soon as it looks curdy, take it off and strain the liquor through a sieve. What remains on the sieve is to be used for coloring the soup. Just before serving the soup add the asparagus tops, which have been separately boiled. Barley Soup. — Put 2 or 3 lbs. of shin of beef in a gallon of water. Add a teacupful of pearl barley, three large onions, cut small, a small bunch of parsley, a few potatoes, sliced, a little thyme, and pepper and salt to taste. Simmer gently for three or four hours, and frequently stir it to prevent the meat from burning. It should not be allowed to boil. Barley Soup, Cream of. — Three pints of white stock, an onion, sliced, a little cinnamon and mace, and one teacupful of barley. Allow these to cook very slowly four hours, then rub through a sieve and add one pint of boiling milk and half a pint of cream. Season with salt and cayenne pepper. The yolks of two eggs, beaten light, with two table-spoonfuls of cream added to the boiling milk just before the soup is taken from the fire, make it very much richer. Barley Soupe Maigre. — Take V\ lb. of pearl barley; boil it for five hours in two quarts of water, which must reduce to one quart. Pass through a tamis ; season with salt and pepper, and stir in ozs. of fresh butter, or, if preferred, some cream, or a gill of milk into which the yolk of one egg has been stirred. A variety can be made by putting in some chopped parsley, or a few young pease (boiled), so as to have the contrast of green with the white puree. Bean Soup (dried). — Kidney, mock-turtle, or rice, or field beans. The mock-turtle is best. One gallon of cold water, one quart of beans, soaked overnight in luke-warm water, 2 lbs. of salt pork, cut into small pieces, one teaspoonful of sugar, one red - pepper pod, or cayenne pepper to taste. Put the water, pork, and beans into a closely covered soup-pot, and boil three hours, then add a head of celery and the pepper. Simmer an hour longer, stir in the sugar, strain, and serve with slices of lemon. Or substitute equal parts of beef and lean ham for the pork, and at the last moment drop small force-meat balls and slices of hard-boiled eggs into the soup tureen.