The cult of the chafing dish

Put a finely- shredded onion and a walnut of butter in the Chafing Dish and fry to a light brown colour, then add a heaped teaspoonful of flour and stir well ; pour in a pint of stock, add pepper and salt to taste. Peel and slice a potato and scatter it in the soup ; let the mixture come to a boil, and then allow it to simmer for ten minutes. Just before serving stir into it the yolk of an egg, well beaten up, and a dozen sippets of dry toast. This is a soothing and easy soup, but it requires the stockpot, unless you make use of one of the many varieties of concentrated bouillon or beef-tea, which certainly save a lot of trouble. Palestine Soup. Another simple soup, which moreover has the advantage of not requiring stock, is Palestine or Jerusalem Artichoke soup. By the way, we misname this vegetable strangely. It was imported into Great Britain from Italy, and being the tuber of a variety of sunflower, is there termed Girasole, because the flower turns to the sun. We, in our insular ignorance, corrupted Girasole to Jerusalem, and then, wishing to refine the latter word, committed a further solecism by calling the soup made therefrom Palestine soup. Could any little exercise in culinary etymology be more ridiculous, or more typical ? Pick out six good-sized Jerusalem artichokes, boil them in the Chafing Dish with a pinch of salt ; when quite soft, put them through a fine sieve and place the extract on one side. Then put a pint of milk in the dish and boil it with a teaspoonful of Paprika pepper, two cloves and a dash of nutmeg, and a couple of sprigs of parsley. Let it boil up for a minute and then strain it, and also put it aside. Melt a walnut of butter in the dish and stir into it a dessert-spoonful of cornflour, to which add the strained milk, and, lastly, the artichoke extract, keeping the spiritlamp flame low, so that the mixture shall not boil. When it has simmered for five minutes and become thoroughly amalgamated the soup is ready to serve, and very good it is, or ought to be, if the cooking has been artfully and carefully carried out. Crécy (Carrot) Soup. Carrot Soup is not only excessively nice and nourishing, but it has also a curious historical interest. The best French carrots come from the neighbourhood of Crécy, and Carrot Soup is therefore generally known as Cregy Soup. Now the famous battle of that name, where Edward the Black Prince won his three-feather badge and motto of Ich Dien, was fought on Saturday, August 26, 1346, and Court gossip relates that to this day the Prince of Wales has Crécy Soup for dinner every 26th of August. I am unable to verify the statement, but trust that it may be true ; anyway it is a pretty fable. To make Carrot Soup, cut up three or four fair-sized carrots into thin round slices, put them in the Chafing Dish with a wineglass of sherry, two cloves, a sprinkling of nutmeg, and a good bunch of parsley ; pour over it a cupful of stock and let it nearly boil, but not quite. When the carrots are D quite soft and almost pulpy, mash them well in a soup-plate and, discarding anything hard in the mixture, replace it in the Chafer with two more cups of stock, a teaspoon of sugar, and just before it boils drop in a walnut of butter, and take it off the flame. Toasted dice are the usual accompaniment, and the soup, if well concocted, is very hard to beat for honest, toothsome fare.