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CHAPTER XXXVI: Strain
Wash the beans and soak over night; in the morning put them in the fireless vessel, add the pork and salt, boil ten minutes, then set into the cooker for five hours. Strain, thicken, and serve.
Creole Soup. 1 quart brown soup stock, 1 pint tomatoes, 3 tablespoonfuls chopped green peppers, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onion, + cupful butter, cupful flour, Salt, Pepper, Cayenne, tablespoonfuls grated horseradish, 1 teaspoonful vinegar, cupful macaroni rings.
Cook pepper and onion in butter five minutes. Add flour, stock, and tomatoes, and simmer fifteen minutes. Strain, rub through sieve, and season highly with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Just before serving, add horse-radish, vinegar, and macaroni previously cooked and cut in rings. -FANNIE MERRITT FARMER.
Veal Soup. 2 pounds veal, 2 quarts cold water, 1 cupful chopped ham, 1 onion, 1 tablespoonful parsley, Pepper and salt, 1 pint cream, 3 slices carrot.
Cook veal in water slowly for two or three hours. Take out the veal and add to the boiling stock ham, onion, parsley, and carrot. Let this simmer slowly for an hour, strain, then add the cream, season with salt and pepper, and serve with croutons.
Consommé. 3 pounds lean beef, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1 parsnip, 1 onion, 1 red pepper, 1 tablespoonful whole cloves, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 4 stalks celery, 3 quarts water.
Cover the meat with water, and simmer four hours. Add the other ingredients, and cook one hour long- Strain and stand over night.
Next day skim off the grease, add the er. white and shell of one egg to clear it, boil up, strain again, and serve with imperial sticks.
Brown Stock. 10 pounds shin beef, 3 slices bacon, 4 onions, 3 carrots, 1 turnip, 1 bunch celery, 1 sprig parsley, 1 sprig thyme, 12 cloves, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls salt, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 7 quarts cold water.
Cut in rather small pieces all the meat from a shin of beef; break the bone in pieces, and put into a large pot with bacon, onions, carrots, turnip, celery, parsley, thyme, salt, cloves, pepper, butter, and a cupful cold water. Set it over a brisk fire, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Cook until the juice from the meat and vegetables begins to thicken. Then add cold water, set it back on the fire, where it will simmer slowly for six hours, skimming very often. Strain carefully through a fine sieve, not bruising the vegetables. Next morning skim off the fat. You can make a variety of soups from this stock by adding to it macaroni, Italian paste, or finely cut vegetables.
Tomato Soup. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls onion, 1 bay leaf, 10 peppers, 1 tablespoonful chopped ham, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 can tomatoes, 3 cupfuls stock, 1 teaspoonful salt, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
This is a run of soup formulas from a stock-and-soup chapter, set down in the telegraphic style of 1900s cookery columns and further mangled by the scanner. Several quantities have lost their fractions in printing, so read the ratios rather than the numerals.
- The fireless cookerThe first recipe assumes a fireless cooker: an insulated box in which food, brought to a hard boil, finishes on retained heat alone. A modern slow cooker on low, or a covered pot in a 250F oven, does the same job while actually holding temperature. Do not improvise an insulated box with pork in it; retained-heat cookers coast downward through the bacterial danger range over five hours.
- Missing fractions"+ cupful butter, cupful flour" and "cupful macaroni rings" have all lost their fractions on the page. The butter and flour are a roux and should be equal by volume; for a quart of stock plus a pint of tomatoes, 3 to 4 tablespoons of each gives a lightly bound soup. The macaroni quantity is genuinely unrecoverable, so add to taste.
- "10 peppers"In the tomato soup this most likely means ten peppercorns rather than ten chili peppers. The page breaks off before the method, but whole spice of this kind would normally be strained out with the bay leaf.
- Clearing consommeThe egg white and crushed shell form a raft that traps suspended particles as the liquid comes up to a bare simmer. It must not be stirred once it sets, and the soup must not boil hard or the raft breaks and the broth clouds again. Ladle through a cloth-lined sieve rather than pouring.
- Brown stock methodThe initial browning is done in the pot with only a cupful of water, over high heat, until the exuded juices reduce and caramelize on the bottom. That fond is the whole point of the color and flavor; the cold water added afterward deglazes it.
- Straining without pressing"Not bruising the vegetables" is the instruction that matters in the stock. Pushing softened onion and carrot through the sieve clouds the stock and turns it sweet and vegetal, which defeats its use as a neutral base.
- Veal soup and the creamAdd the pint of cream off the boil, after straining, and reheat gently. A stock this lean will curdle if the cream is boiled into it, and there is no roux here to stabilize it.
- Imperial sticks and croutonsImperial sticks were a thin crisp baked stick, given in period books as either bread or pastry, served alongside clear soup. Cheese straws or thin toasted bread sticks serve the same purpose.
- Tabasco"McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce" is the same product sold today; the brand name was still worth spelling out in full when this was written. A dash means a dash.
These pages belong to the era when a household's cooking was organized around a stockpot, which is why the brown stock recipe ends by listing what can be added to it rather than how to serve it. The borrowing is characteristic too. One recipe is credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose Boston Cooking-School Cook Book had made standardized level measurements the American norm, and another carries a running head from Mrs. Curtis's Cook Book, compiled by Isabel Gordon Curtis and published in the first decade of the twentieth century; compendia of household knowledge routinely lifted from the named authorities of the day with an attribution line and no further ceremony. The fireless cooker in the bean soup helps date the collection: insulated retained-heat cookers were sold hard in the 1900s and 1910s as a fuel-saving convenience for households still cooking on coal ranges, and cookbooks of the period regularly included a handful of recipes written specifically for them.