Vegetable Soup. No. 5.
Take four turnips, two potatoes, three onions, three heads of celery, two carrots, four cabbage lettuces, a bunch of sweet herbs, and parsley. The vegetables must be cut in slices; put them into a stewpan, with half a pint of water; cover them close; set them over the fire for twenty minutes to draw; add three pints of broth or water, and let it boil quickly. When the vegetables are tender rub them through a sieve. If you make the soup with water, add butter, flour, pepper, and salt. Let it be of the thickness of good cream, and add some fine crumbs of bread with small dumplings.
Vermicelli Soup.
Break the vermicelli a little, throw it into boiling water, and let it boil about two minutes. Strain it in a sieve, and throw it into cold water: then strain and put it into a good clear consommé, and let it boil very slowly about a quarter of an hour. When it is going to table, season with a little salt, and put into it a little crust of French roll.
West India Soup, called Pepper Pot.
A small knuckle of veal and a piece of beef of about three pounds, seven or eight pounds of meat in all; potherbs as for any other soup. When the soup is skimmed and made, strain it off. The first ingredient you add to the soup must be some dried ocre (a West India vegetable), the quantity according to your judgment. It is hard and dry, and therefore requires a great deal of soaking and boiling. Then put in the spawn of the lobsters you intend for your soup, first pounding it very fine, and mixing it by degrees with a little of your soup cooled, or it will be lumpy, and not so smooth as it should be. Put it into the soup-pot, and continue to stir some time after it is in. Take about two middling handfuls of spinach and about six hearts of the inside of very nice greens; scald both greens and spinach before you put them to the soup, to take off the rawness; the greens require most scalding. Squeeze them quite dry, chop and put them into the soup; then add all the fat and inside egg and spawn you can get from the lobsters, also the meat out of the tails and claws. Add the green tops only of a large bundle of asparagus, of the sort which they call sprew-grass, previously scalded; a few green peas also are very good. After these ingredients are in, the soup should no more than simmer; and when the herbs are sufficiently tender it is done enough. This soup is not to be clear, on the contrary thick with the lobster, and a perfect mash with the lobster and greens. You are to put in lobster to your liking; I generally put in five or six, at least of that part of them which is called fat, egg, and inside spawn, sufficient to make it rich and good. It should look quite yellow with this. Put plenty of the white part also, and in order that none of the goodness of the lobsters should be lost, take the shells of those which you have used, bruise them in a mortar, and boil them in some of the broth, to extract what goodness remains; then strain off the liquor and add it to the rest. Scoop some potatoes round, half boiling them first, and put into it. Season with red pepper. Put in a piece of nice pickled pork, which must be first scalded, for fear of its being too salt; stew it with the rest and serve it.
White Soup. No. 1.
Take two chickens; skin them; take out the lungs and wash them thoroughly; put them in a stewpan with some parsley. Add a quart of veal jelly, and stew them in this for one hour over a very slow fire. Then take out the chickens, and put a penny roll to soak in the liquor; take all the flesh of the chickens from the bones, and pound it in a mortar, with the yolk of three eggs boiled hard. Add the bread (when soaked enough) and pound it also with them; then rub the whole finely through a sieve. Add a quart more jelly to the soup, and strain it through a sieve; then put the chicken to the soup. Set a quart of cream on the fire till it boils, stirring it all the time; when ready to serve, pour that into the soup and mix it well together. Have ready a little vermicelli, boiled in a little weak broth, to throw into the soup, when put into the terrine.
White Soup. No. 2.
Have good stock made of veal and beef; then take about a pound of veal, and the like quantity of ham, cut both into thin slices, and put them into a stewpan, with a pint of water and two onions cut small. Set it on the fire and stew it down gently, till it is quite dry, and of a rather light brown colour; then add the stock, and let it all stew till the veal and ham are quite tender. Strain it off into the stewpot; add a gill or more of cream, some blanched rice boiled tender, the quantity to your own judgment, the yolks of six eggs beaten up well with a little new milk: let the soup be boiling hot before the eggs are added, which put to it by degrees, keeping it stirring over a slow fire. Serve it very hot: to prevent curdling, put the soup-pot into a large pot of boiling water, taking care that not the least drop of water gets in, and so make it boiling hot.