The spirit of cookery

Souchy- Broth. — Some prepare the souchy-broth with the trimmings of the fish which they intend to cut up for the souchies, but these will yield only a very thin decoction. Others make extract of from six to twelve flounders, which, properly concentrated, give a good fish broth. Others, again, extract the fishy flavour from the trimmings by means of weak stock or half standard broth, which gives a good flavour. The principal advantage of this souchet-broth will be reaped by eating-houses, where scores of fishes can be boiled one after the other in the same liquor. For use in private houses the souchy process offers no advantage over plain boiling. Souchies can be made with salmon — in which case they become equivalent to darne — sole, flounder, eel, perch, tench, trout, char, and other fish. In some cookery-books you are directed to send to table brown bread and butter with all souchies, a mode of premature stufling which should be discountenanced. The bread-and-butter had better remain associated with whitebait only, though even with this it has no patent or mystic connection. Turtle Soup, Soupe à la Tortue à l'Anglaise, is a clear or thick gravy soup, containing the gelatinous flaps of the skin and some of the green fat of the turtle, and adventitious quenelles. Turtles of all sizes yield good skin flaps, but TURTLE SOUP only medium-sized turtles of about 120 lb. in weight yield delicate fat ; the smaller ones are often without any fat at all, and in the larger ones the fat is liable to be of bad taste. The killing and dissecting for the kitchen of a turtle is a complicated process, the description of which may be left to technical books. The skin at the junction of the head and extremities with the body is easily isolated ; that underlying the scales of the lower or breast plate, plastron, and the convex back shell, carapace, can only be obtained by boiling the shields, cut into small pieces by a bone-saw. Most recipes advise that the cook should return the stripped bones to the water in which they were boiled for the purpose of, by further boiling, extracting all their supposed savour. This shows how errors, once started, become generalised and made permanent. The boiling of these bones is perfectly useless, as they, like their relations in beef, do not contribute any useful ingredient to the decoction, and may, like that decoction itself, be excluded from further participation in the process. The preparation of turtle stock does not differ from that of any of the best soups described above ; but its flavour is specialized by the addition of puree of turtle soup herbs, which consists of sweet basil, winter savory, marjoram, and lemon thyme, besides the usual vegetable symphony. Some recipes add wine, such as old madeira, to the soup, which others think unnecessary, or even prejudicial. The fat is boiled in soup sauce, changing its colour from bluish to green. The quenelles are to be shaped like small turtle’s eggs, and to be poached in broth. The traditional recipes for the turtle soup broth do not state the actual quantity of soup to be obtained from the accurately described materials. We can, however, construct from the material its possible maximum strength if it is to remain a savoury soup according to our standard. We