Clam Soup.
Open the clams and chop them up fine. To twenty clams, add:
½ gallon water.
3 good onions.
2 tablespoonfuls butter.
A small bunch of parsley and thyme.
Just before taking off, add one quart rich milk and thicken with flour.—Mrs. D.
Crab Soup.
Open, and cleanse of the deadman's fingers and sandbag, twelve small fat crabs raw. Cut the crabs into two parts. Parboil and extract the meat from the claws, and simply extract the fat from the back shells of the crabs. Scald eighteen ripe tomatoes, skin them and squeeze the pulp from the seeds through a colander. Chop them fine and pour boiling water over the seeds and juice, and strain them. Stew a short time in the soup-pot one large onion, one clove of garlic, in one spoonful butter and two spoonfuls lard, and put them in the tomatoes.
After stewing a few minutes, add the meat from the claws, then the crabs, and lastly the fat from the back shells. Season with salt, cayenne and black pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram and thyme, one-half teaspoonful lemon juice, and peel of one lemon. Pour in the water with which the seeds were scalded, adding more should there not be the quantity of soup required. Boil moderately one hour. About a quarter of an hour before serving, sift in grated bread crumbs or pounded crackers as a thickening. Any firm fish prepared by this recipe is excellent.—Mrs. J. I.