Virginia Cookery-book

Cut up the head into small pieces and boil in a large quantity of water until it is boiled all to pieces. Take out all the bones (as in making souse cheese) and boil again until thick. Then season very highly with pepper, salt, catsup, allspice, and onions, chopped fine, and pour into crocks to jelly or harden. To make soup cut out a thick slice or " hunk " and add about a quart of boiling water, if you have not more than five or six persons in family. Boil for a few minutes only, and you have a nice dish of soup. In seasoning use, say, two onions, a table-spoonful of pepper, one of salt, two table-spoonfuls of catsup, one teaspoonful of allspice, and one ounce of celery-seed. Asparagus Soup. Take four bunches — that is to say, about four dozen heads — of asparagus, cut off three inches of the tops and lay them aside for the present in a pan of water ; scrape the rest of the stalks well and put on in your soup-pot with three quarts of water. Let the asparagus boil for an hour; then take it off the fire, strain it, water and all, through the colander, pulping it with your potato-masher. Return the water to the soup-pot, add to it either a chicken, the bones of which have been broken up after jointing, or two pounds of lean veal, chopped up. Boil again dowly for two hours, then add the asparagus left out before; let it cook until these are done tender; thicken with two table-spoonfuls of flour rubbed into one tablespoonful of butter, creamed smoothly together ; add lastly half a teacupful of new milk, and serve hot. Skim off carefully any grease that rises to the surface. Put toast cut into small squares into the bottom of the tureen before pouring in the soup. Beef Soup. Beef is decidedly the best meat for the substratum of every-day soup, and may be used daily, with slight variations, without wearying a common palate. Get from your butcher a shin-bone, if he has it, or else the coarse neck pieces will answer, that are good for nothing else, and can be purchased cheap. Put it on in a gallon of cold water as early in the morning as you can ; set it on the back of the stove, in a covered kettle, where it may simmer slowly till dinner is ready — not boil. In winter add, about an hour before dinner, any vegetables almost that you have at hand and like — dried tomatoes are invaluable for this purpose — potatoes, turnips in moderation, carrots too, to be used also cautiously; dried corn a handful, Lima beans ad libitum, a teacupful of rice, etc. If you like soup thickened, it is done by rubbing up flour carefully with a piece of butter, and adding it just before you want to serve the soup, allowing it, of course, time enough to serve its end. If you want your soup brown, add some browned flour, of which you should always keep a supply by you in the kitchen. Remove the soup from the fire a while before you are ready for it, skim off every particle of grease, and then return it to the fire, so that it may become perfectly hot. Chicken Soup. For a gallon tureen a large, grown fowl is required, if you would make a pot of good, strong soup. Cut up the chicken into joints and put it into cold water, with a flavoring of one onion, a teaspoonful of black pepper, a teaspoonful of salt. Let these things simmer together from nine o'clock in the morning till one, if your dinner-hour is two o'clock ; then add a full teacup of rice, with a teaspoonful of bruised celery-seed, or two heads of fresh celery, chopped up, or a bunch of parsley chopped into bits, according as shall suit your taste or convenience. A nice thickening is furnished by beating up the yolks of two eggs, and stirring into them a tablespoonful of flour and a cup of perfectly sweet milk. Pour to them a little of the soup boiling, then return all to the pot on the fire for a few minutes, and serve hot.