You may heighten the green of this soup by adding the juice of a handful of spinach, pounded in a mortar and strained. Or you may colour it with the juice of boiled spinach squeezed through a cloth. The spinach juice should be put in fifteen or ten minutes before you take up the soup, as a short boiling in it will take off the peculiar taste.
Cut up four pounds of knuckle of veal; season it with white pepper and salt: put it into a soup-pan and let it boil slowly till the meat drops from the bone. Then strain it off. Have ready a pair of young fowls skinned, and cut up as you carve them at table. Season them with white pepper, salt, and mace. Put them into the soup, add a handful of chopped parsley, and let them boil. When the pieces of chicken are all quite tender, have ready four or five eggs well beaten. Stir the egg into the soup, and take it immediately off the fire lest it curdle. Serve up the chicken in the soup.
Rabbits may be substituted for fowls.
Catfish that have been caught near the middle of the river are much nicer than those that are taken near the shore where they have access to impure food. The small white ones are the best. Having cut off their heads, skin the fish, and clean them, and cut them in three. To twelve small catfish allow a pound and a half of ham. Cut the ham into small pieces, or slice it very thin, and scald it two or three times in boiling water, lest it be too salt. Chop together a bunch of parsley and some sweet marjoram stripped from the stalks. Put these ingredients into a soup kettle and season them with pepper: the ham will make it salt enough. Add a head of celery cut small, or a large table-spoonful of celery seed tied up in a bit of clear muslin to prevent its dispersing. Pat in two quarts of water, cover the kettle, and let it boil slowly till every thing is sufficiently done, and the fish and ham quite tender. Skim it frequently. Boil in another vessel a quart of rich milk, in which you have melted a quarter of a pound of butter divided into small bits and rolled in flour. Pour it hot to the soup, and stir in at the last the beaten yolks of four eggs. Give it another boil, just to take off the rawness of the eggs, and then put it into a tureen, taking out the bag of celery seed before you send the soup to table, and adding some toasted bread cut into small squares. In making toast for soap, cut the bread thick, and pare off all the crust.
This soup will be found very fine.
Eel soup may be made in the same manner: chicken soup also.
Have ready a good broth made of a knuckle of veal boiled slowly in as much water as will cover it, till the meat is reduced to rags. It must then be well strained.