Southern Recipes

One quart milk, six large potatoes, one stalk celery, one onion, and one tablespoonful of butter. Put milk to boil with onion and celery. Pare potatoes and boil thirty minutes, mash fine and light, add boiling milk and butter, salt and pepper, to taste. Rub through a strainer and serve immediately. One tablespoonful whipped cream added improves it. BLACK BEAN SOUP Beef, chicken (any bones except duck), put with them one quart of black beans into cold water, one tablespoonful of cloves (whole) , three-fourths of a tablespoonful of allspice, (no vegetables). Cook all day, stirring occasionally, so the beans will not bum; strain, add good glass of wine, hard boiled egg, and slice lemon. Pepper and salt. OKRA GUMBO Make roux of lard, flour and onion, as for gumbo file, also cook chicken in this, then add two quarts of okra cut up fine. Cover pot and let it simmer a little while, then pour in about two quarts of boiling water if needed. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Fresh corn is very good in this. Serve with rice. CRAB SOUP A heaping dessertspoonful of flour, a heaping tablespoonful butter, one quart of milk, season with salt, pepper, spices, and a wineglass of sherry. Put flour and butter in one pot; milk with spices (tied up in cloth) in another pot; when the milk boils, add it slowly to the flour and butter, then add crab meat, and sherry when you pour into tureen. GOPHER SOUP Gopher is a dry land turtle. Make roux of flour and lard and onion, then put in gopher, cook a few minutes in roux, then pour in two quarts of boiling water, a can of tomatoes, salt and pepper to taste. Tie in a thin piece of doth some whole spice and cloves, put this in, cook all slowly for two hours, then put in a tumbler of claret, and a lemon sliced, as you remove soup from fire. TURBOT 2 LA CRÈME Boil your fish (red snapper if turbot cannot be had) in strong salt water, remove bones and flake it in as large pieces as possible. Boil one quart of sweet cream, into which put a small onion (whole), a bunch of parsley; then add three tablespoonfuls of flour, smoothly mixed in a little milk, stir until cream begins to thicken and is smooth. (It will take about five or eight minutes.) Remove onion and parsley and pour into the mixture quarter of a pound of melted butter. Butter a deep baking dish ; put in first a layer of fish, then a layer of grated cheese (stale Edam is very fine), then a layer of cream mixture, and so on until dish is filled; sift over the top a layer of stale grated bread crumbs or cracker crumbs and cheese. Bake from three-quarters of an hour to one hour according to oven ; must not get too dry ; garnish with parsley and serve with the following sauce: SAUCE Put in saucepan the yolks of four eggs, two dessertspoonfuls of vinegar and a pinch of salt; whip the mixture well and when it forms a sort of cream add four dessertspoonfuls of olive oil, small teaspoonful of mixed mustard, a pinch of finely minced parsley, a little cayenne pepper and a lemon which has been very delicately sliced. Let this mixture come to a boil, and when it has boiled two minutes remove from the fire and serve hot with the fish. If sauce should get too stiff, it can be thinned by adding a little vinegar. COURTBOUILLON Three pounds of red snapper or red fish, one tablespoonful of lard, two tablespoonfuls of flour, one large onion, six fresh tomatoes or a pint of canned tomatoes, four sprigs of parsley, one clove of garlic, six or