Black Mexican Bean Soup
From Virginia Cookery-book, 1884
Serves 6
Force-meat balls can be omitted for a nourishing soup.
Presented as published in 1884. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation below, not the original instructions.
A modern interpretation · AI-generated from the original record
Ingredients
Method
As published
This recipe was extracted from Virginia Cookery-book (1884) by Mary Stuart Smith, page 38. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.
Black Mexican Bean Soup. — Force-meat Balls for Bean Soup. — Corn Soup. — Calfs- head Soup. — Gumbo. — Mock-turtle Soup. — Little Eggs for Turtle or Mock-turtle Soup.— Oyster Soup, No. 1. — Oyster Soup, No. 2. — Okra Soup. — Ox-tail Soup. — Green-pea Soup. — Squirrel Soup. — ^Tomato Soup. — Good Lenten Soups. Stock fob Soup. Eably in the morning put two shins and fifteen or twen- ty pounds of coarse beef in eight gallons of cold water. Boil eight or ten hours, keeping it covered all the time. Carefully skim off all the grease. Put in two onions, sliced, a handful of celery, six turnips, cut up, four pods of capsicum, half an ounce each of cloves and mace, a table- spoonful of black pepper, garden herbs, such as savory, winter and summer, thyme and marjoram, a table-spoonful each, powdered, and six slices of lean ham. From eight this stock should be boiled down to four gallons. When properly boiled strain it through flannel three or four double, and when cold it will be a fine jelly, and will keep in winter a fortnight, in summer on ice four or five days. For a tureen of soup take two quarts of the jelly, adding any additional seasoning that your taste suggests. Always remember, however, that it is better to put rather too little than too much, because a deficiency may be supplemented by the castors at table, but no skill can atone for carelessly overturning either the salt-cellar or pepper-cruet into the soup. As soon as this soup stock VIRGINIA COOKBRT-BOOK. 73 boils send it to table. Stock should be made without any salt, as that spoils the color. To Pekpare a Beef's Head fob Soup Stock. 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 teaspoonf ul of allspice, and one ounce of celery-seed. AsPABAGus 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 table- spoonful of butter, creamed smoothly together ; add lastly half a teacupf ul of new milk, and serve hot. Skim off carefully any grease that rises to the surface. Put toast 4 74 VIMGINIA COOKEHT-BOOK, cut into small squares into the bottom of the tureen before pouring in the soup. Bbbf Soup. Beef is decidedly the best meat for the substratum of every-day soup, and may be used daily, with slight varia- tions, 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 dd 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 coarse, 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 par- ticle 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 fla- voring of one onion, a teaspoonf ul of black pepper, a tea- spoonful of salt. Let these things simmer together from VIBOINIA COOKERY-BOOK. 75 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 tea- spoonful of bruised celery-seed, or two heads of iresh cel- ery, 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 table - spoonful 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. Black Mbxicai^^ Bban Soup. To one pint of black beans put four quarts of water, two slices of nice lean bacon, or the hock which is cut off when the ham is boiled ; one small chicken or half a large one, or a small piece of any fresh meat. After the meat or chicken has boiled until it is done take it out and make force - meat balls of it ; fry them, and put them in the soup. Boil four eggs hard, slice them up into rings, and drop them into the tureen when about to be served. Fla- vor also with a broken pod of red pepper and a teaspoon- ful of bruised celery-seed. Some persons also add a small wineglassf ul of catsu
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