Julienne Soup, with Poached Eggs (Dubois).
Take two medium-sized carrots, a medium-sized turnip, a piece of celery, the core of a lettuce, and an onion. Cut them into thin fillets about an inch long. Fry the onion in butter over a moderate fire, without allowing it to take color; add the carrots, turnips, and celery—raw, if tender; if not, boil them separately for a few minutes. After frying all slowly for a few moments, season with a pinch of salt and a tea-spoonful of powdered-sugar. Then moisten them with a gill of broth, and boil until reduced to a glaze. Now add nearly two quarts of good stock, which has been skimmed and passed through a sieve, and remove the stew-pan to the back of the stove, so that the soup may boil only partially. A quarter of an hour after add the lettuce (which has been boiled in other water), and a few raw sorrel leaves, if they can be procured. This soup is quite good enough without eggs, yet they are a pleasant addition. Poach them in salted water, trim them, and drop into the soup-tureen just as it is ready to send to the table. Many color this soup with caramel. In that case, the sugar should be omitted.
Asparagus Soup.
Ingredients: Three pints of beef soup or stock, thirty heads of asparagus, a little cream, butter, flour, and a little spinach.
Cut the tops off the asparagus, about half an inch long, and boil the rest. Cut off all the tender portions, and rub them through a sieve, adding a little salt. Warm three pints of stock, add a roux made of a small piece of butter and a heaping tea-spoonful of flour; then add the asparagus pulp. Boil it slowly a quarter of an hour, stirring in two or three table-spoonfuls of cream. Color the soup with a tea-spoonful of spinach green, and, just before serving it, add the asparagus-tops, which have been separately boiled.
Many like this soup, but I prefer simply boiled asparagus-points added to stock or beef soup, just before serving.
Spinach Green.
Pound some spinach well, adding a few drops of water; squeeze the juice through a cloth, and put it on a strong fire. As soon as it looks curdy, take it off, and strain the liquor through a sieve. What remains on the sieve will be the coloring matter.
Ox-tail Soup.
Ox-tails make an especially good soup, on account of the gelatinous matter they contain.