(The pea soap being now about ready to take up, Miss Corson continued:)
(The pea soap being now about ready to take up, Miss Corson continued:)
You know how the flour of the peas settles to the bottom of the soup tureen or plate, and leaves the top clear? Prevent that by adding to the soup, just before it is dished, a little paste made of flour and butter. For four quarts of soup a tablespoonful of flour and a tablespoonful of butter; mix the flour and butter to a smooth paste just before the soup is done. After the peas are soft pour them into a fine sieve and rub them through the sievewith a potato masher; just a stout wire sieve. After you have rubbed them through the sieve put them back into the soup kettle with the soup, and mix the flour and butter in with them over the fire; stir them until they come to a boil, then season palatably with salt and pepper, and the soup is ready to serve. Remember this is a perfectly plain soup I am making to-day, without the addition of meat of any kind; but of course you will vary the flavor of the soup by adding the bones of ham or other meat, or a very little fried onion. Now, you can count for yourselves how cheap a soup that is.
Question.Can you give us your experience with regard to pea meal for soup?
Miss Corson.I have used one form that has been put on the New York market. It was made of dried green peas. I do not know whether there is on this market a meal made of the yellow peas. There is a German preparation which is admirable. In New York it is for sale at the German stores; but the meal of which I speak, the meal made of dried green peas, was not at all satisfactory to me. Of course the meal of the green peas has not the flavor of the split peas. You will find in rubbing the peas through the sieve that if you moisten them a little once in a while they will go through more readily.
I have left the brown stew with all the fat on. It is a question not only of taste but of economy whether you leave on the fat in addition to the first butter in which you browned the meat, a question of economy and nourishment. If the people you are cooking for have good strong digestions you do not need to remove the fat. The bread or potatoes which are eaten with the stew will absorb it and will render it perfectly digestible; and, of course, as I have already told you, the fat serves certain purposes in nutrition. If you are cooking for people having weak digestions then you would take the fat off the stew. The white stew I am going to finish plain, without any parsley or egg—simply seasoned with salt and pepper.
Our lesson this morning is the clarifying of soup, or the soup stock that we made yesterday; caramel for coloring soup, gravy and sauces; baked whitefish, after a very nice Western fashion; beefsteak, broiled and fried; and baked apple dumplings.
The first thing I prepare will be the whitefish, after a method which I learned from one of my Cleveland friends, who, by the way, is one of the nicest cooks I know of. I shall use only a little butter, and tell you about the wine which the recipe calls for. When the fish is prepared especially for gentlemen, wine is considered exceedingly nice, but that, as in all other cookery, is a matter of choice. We to-day will use some butter, pepper and salt. I will tell you the kind of wine, and the quantity that is used, when I come to cook the fish. In the winter, of course, all the fish is frozen. We were speaking of that yesterday, how to prepare frozen fish. In the first place, thaw it in plenty of cold water. Put it in a large pan of cold water and let it stay till it is perfectly thawed. Then cut it from the bone and take off the skin. Now, please write down the directions, and then watch and see how I do it. The fish simply has been scaled; to cut it from the bone, make one cut down to the bone through the middle of the side of the fish, lengthwise; having made that line, cut round under the head, to the bone; now lay the knife against the bone of the fish, and turn it until you have the blade cutting against the bone, holding the knife flat; it will take that entire piece of the fish off; cut two pieces from one side of the fish. Now I am going to cut from the other side in the same way, and then I shall take the skin off. First take the four pieces of fish off the bone; you will not find this at all difficult to do, ladies; after you have done it once or twice it will be very easy, and if you have fish that has not been frozen it will be much more easy to do than if you have frozen fish, which, of course, will break a little. It is not possible to keep the pieces entire, cutting from a frozen fish. One of the ladies asks if this can be done as well if the fish has been dressed by the fishmonger; that is, if the entrails have been taken out. Yes, quite as well. This is not dressed simply because it had been sent from market without being dressed. I did not take the trouble to have it dressed here, as I am not going to use the bone ofthe fish. After I have finished giving you the direction for taking off the skin, I am going to tell you how you could use the bone of the fish. To cut the skin off the fish, lay the pieces of fish skin down on the board; then, holding the knife down straight, cut through the fish until you feel the skin under the knife; as soon as you feel the skin under the knife, flatten the knife out so that it lies against the skin; cut away from you, holding the knife perfectly level, leaving the skin between the board and the knife. Hold the piece of fish in your fingers; lay it flat on the board, skin down, keeping hold of the skin all the time. That takes the skin off, and none of the fish; there is no waste there, and it certainly is very much easier to eat fish in this shape than it is if you have the skin and bone on it. Now, I assure you, ladies, if you only hold the knife flat, you will have no trouble whatever in taking the skin off. If you slant it you will cut through the skin of the fish, but if you hold it perfectly flat you will have no trouble. Of course, with certain kinds of fish there are bones that run transversely from the spine out through the sides of the fish. You do not take these bones out by this operation, but you take out the large back bone. It comes out every time, and I assure you it is a very easy operation.
After you have taken all the skin and bones from the fish, then, for this special dish, cut it in small slices three inches long and a couple of inches wide. Use two soup plates, or two dishes of the same size, deep dishes that you can send to the table. Butter them very thickly, both of them. Lay the fish in one of the dishes, season the layers with salt and pepper, and put a very little butter between each layer, and plenty of butter on the top. Turn the second plate over the first one, upside down on it. Put the dishes with the fish between them into the oven to bake for about twenty minutes, or until the fish flakes. You can tell about that by opening the oven at the end of twenty minutes, and lifting off the top plate; then you can see whether the fish is done or not. Now, in the recipe of which I spoke to you first, the addition of Sauterne wine is made. After the fish is put into the dish, being seasoned as I have told you, using less butter than you would without the wine, with half as much butter on the layers, pour on Sauterne wine,—that is a light, rather acid wine,—just enough to moisten the fish. In placing the fish into the dish it does not make any difference which side you put down. You simply want to put the pieces nicelytogether so that when you come to help them you can lift each piece out with a spoon. There is no acid that will take the place of the wine and give the same taste. The fish is very nice cooked simply with the butter, pepper and salt. You do not need the wine to make a nice dish, only wine is used by the lady of whom I speak. That is her special preparation of the dish. The wine is put in after the fish is in the dish, just enough wine to moisten it. You will notice that often I will make dishes that have no wine in them; if I make dishes that require wine, I of course put it in, saying that you may use the wine or not, as you please. In this instance I use butter, pepper and salt because it makes a very nice dish, a very nice plain dish, but it is a distinct dish, entirely different to the dish cooked with wine; simply two ways of cooking fish, making two different dishes. For a fish of this size—which probably weighed nearly three pounds—you may use about a heaping tablespoonful of butter in all; that is, besides what you put on the plates. You will butter the plates, and distribute butter throughout the dish. The oven should be moderately hot, not hot enough to brown it—hot enough to heat the plates, which are very thick, and to cook the fish within twenty or twenty-five minutes.
If you wash the board on which the fish is cut, at once, in plenty of hot water, with soap and a little soda or borax all the odor of the fish will be removed. Don’t let any of the utensils stand with the fish drying on them, because if you do it will be very much harder to destroy the odor. And, by the way, ladies, the odor of onions is another thing that troubles some persons. The odor of onions on boards, knives and dishes you can do away with entirely by using parsley. If you take a knife with which you have cut onions, and chop a little parsley with it, or draw the knife through the root of parsley two or three times, it entirely destroys the odor of the onion. So that you see you never need have any trouble in that way in the kitchen.
One of the ladies asks me how to prevent the odor of onions going through the house when you are cooking them. What makes onions, cabbage and turnips smell when you are cooking them is the escape of an exceedingly volatile oil which they all contain; in all of them it has the same characteristics; it does not begin to escape until they are tender. The oil does not begin to escape until the vegetables are tender; if you continue to boil them after that, it will escape. If you take up cabbage or turnips as soon as they are tender, that is, as soon as theirsubstance begins to grow tender, you will notice there will be comparatively little odor; but if you keep on boiling them, according to the old-fashioned rules, for an hour, two hours, or three hours,—you know you sometimes boil cabbage all day long,—you will be sure to have a nice odor through the house. In cutting the onions, of course, if you bend over them, that same oil rising from them escapes as you cut into their substance, and will be sure to make you cry; but if you hold them a little away from you in peeling them, or under water, or if you stand where there is a draught blowing over your hands, it will blow that oil away. In eating onions at the table, if you will subsequently eat parsley dipped in vinegar, you will find that there will be very little odor of the onion remaining in the breath.
Now to return to our fish. After you have taken the flesh of the fish off the bone, you still would see a little of the fish remaining, even if you cut closely. Then draw the fish, and trim the bone; that is, cut off the head, and the fins, and the tail, and take out the entrails of the fish; then make a paste of dry mustard, salt, and a dust of Cayenne pepper. For a bone the size we have here, a long bone like that, use two heaping tablespoonfuls of mustard, a dust of Cayenne pepper and enough vinegar, or Worcestershire sauce, to moisten the mustard to make a paste, which is to be spread over the fishbone. Have the double wire gridiron very thickly buttered, put the bone into the gridiron, brown it quickly at a hot fire, and serve it simply as a relish. A sort of Barmecide feast, but I assure you it is very nice with bread or crackers and butter. It makes a very nice little relish. I might say, ladies, that you can treat any kind of bones in this way. Cold roast beef bones are exceedingly nice. Of course there will be more flesh on the beef bones than on the fish bones.
Use butter, or lard, or very finely chopped suet. If you can get good lard it makes nice pastry; by that I mean lard which has a very little water in it. A good deal of the lard that you buy in the stores has a large proportion of water in it, and I believe in these days it is apt to be sophisticated with several articles which are not exactly lard, so that home-made lard is decidedly the best; that which you try out yourself. First take the butter, or whatever shortening you use,—butter, lard, orsuet,—and mix it with twice the quantity of flour. For instance, if you are going to use a pound of flour allow half a pound of shortening. Take half the shortening and mix it with the flour, using a knife. Then wet the mixed flour and butter with just enough cold water to form a paste which you can roll out. If you mix with a knife or spoon you avoid heating the pastry. After the flour and the first half of the shortening have been mixed to a paste roll it out, about half an inch thick, and put the rest of the shortening in flakes on it. One of the ladies asks about putting flour on the pastry board: Extra flour, of course, besides the quantity that you put in the pastry. The only object in washing the butter is to get out any buttermilk that there may be in it. After putting the butter—the second half of the butter—over the pastry in rather large pieces, put just a little flour over it, fold the pastry in such a way that the edge is turned up all round to inclose the butter; that is about an inch and a half all round. Fold the pastry together thin, and roll it out, and fold it several times. Remember that the oftener you fold it and roll it the more flakes you will have in the cooked pastry. Take care to use flour enough to keep it from sticking to the board or the roller. You will remember the pastry is not salted and unless the shortening has enough salt in it to salt the flour, you must add it. Good lard makes a more tender pastry than butter.
Question.Do you ever mix them?
Miss Corson.Yes, you can mix them if you like, using part lard and part butter. To roll out the pastry, roll it in a rather long strip, that is, a strip about three times as long as it is wide. That enables you then to fold it and keep it in a nice shape. It does not make any difference whether you roll it from you or towards you. As many times as you roll and fold it you give it three additional layers. Now I might keep on rolling and folding indefinitely, and I simply should make the pastry have more layers than this has, but I think you thoroughly understand that, so that I will roll it out, and make our dumplings now. Only remember that the more times you roll it the more folds you make, the more layers you have in the pastry. Keep it as cool as possible all the time. If you roll and fold it three times remember that you have nine layers of butter and pastry. You can roll it out more than that if you want to. Puff paste, which is rolled and folded in this way, has what is called nine turns. Rolling and folding it three times makes a turn. The object of using marble or stone pastry slabs is to keep the pastry cool.If you make more pastry than you want to use, wrap it in a floured towel and put it in a very cool place; then when you are ready to use it roll and fold it two or three times, and it will be very much better than when first made. I am going to roll up a strip of the pastry that I cut off the edge in such a way that you will see how the layers are formed, and you can pass it about. One of the ladies has asked me about heating the flour. It is not necessary to heat the flour for pastry, on the contrary, it would rather tend to spoil it. You want to keep it as cool as possible. But in the winter when you are going to make bread, if you heat the flour it facilitates the rising of the bread; there you need the heat.
For apple dumplings, after the pastry is made, cut it in pieces about four inches square and about a quarter of an inch thick. One of the ladies asks about sifting the flour. That is necessary, always. For apple dumplings, peel the apples and take out the cores, leaving the apples as whole as possible. The corer that I have here is nothing but a round tin cylinder. Use any apple corer that will take the core out without breaking the apple. For this purpose Greening apples are the nicest. These are table apples. Put an apple on each piece of pastry. In the core of the apple put as much sugar as it will hold, and a very small pinch of powdered cinnamon—about a quarter of a saltspoonful of powdered cinnamon, or any powdered spice you prefer. Then fold the corners of the square pieces of pastry up over the apple so that they will lap over on the top of the apple. Fasten the corners by moistening them a little with cold water. After the dumplings are all made, brush them over the top with water, or with melted butter, or with egg, beaten; the entire egg, or if you have the white or the yolk, you can beat that up; of course if you use just the yolk you make them a little yellower. If you use the yolk of an egg, beat it with a little water. Ladies are asking me about that little rolling pin. It is like that little knife, it is bewitched, but the magic consists simply in keeping the rolling pin perfectly smooth, and the knife sharp. That is made of hard wood, and is polished so that it is perfectly smooth, and of course I keep it so by not having it soaked in water. Instead of putting water and soap on to clean it, it simply will be wiped with a wet cloth, and then with a dry one. The thousand dents it has in it it has got by travel; it has beenknocked around in my traveling trunk for the last five years. The dents did not get in it by using it. It may be made of any hard wood. One of the ladies asks me why I leave the corners of the dumpling open. I could pat the crust around and bring it right up close to the apple, but it would not be so light in the first place. The crust will hold together, it will not break apart in baking, and you leave the ends nice and light; and it makes a nicer-looking dumpling. The idea seems to be that if I should close up the corners the juice of the apples would stay in. It won’t boil out much, anyway.
Now, ladies, I am going to take a little of the soup stock that we made yesterday out in a cup and pass it, so you can see what it looks like before it is clarified. That is the soup stock or broth that we made yesterday. You will remember where your recipe ended yesterday, about the soup stock being poured into a bowl and allowed to cool. That is the condition in which the stock is now. After a little, I am going to tell you about the clarifying of it, but now I want to finish telling you about dumplings, so you will have all your dumpling recipes in one place.
The question was asked, I believe, about the temperature of the oven. About the same as for the fish—a moderate oven, so you can put your hand in and count, say fifteen, quickly. It takes from half an hour to three-quarters to bake the dumplings. Be careful not to brown them. If the pastry seems to be browning before the apples get done,—and something will depend upon the kind of apples you use,—cover the pastry with a buttered paper. The object of the egg on the dumplings is to make them a little glossy. Use either butter, or egg, or water for brushing over the tops.
For steamed dumplings usually a suet crust is used. You could use this crust if you wanted to, but it would not be sure to be light. It might possibly absorb a little of the steam. For suet crust you would use half a pound of suet chopped very fine, a teaspoonful of salt and a pound of flour. Mix carefully the flour and suet and salt with enough cold water to make a pastry just soft enough to roll out. Roll it out about a quarter of an inch thick, and then cut it in little squares; prepare the apples just as I prepare them for the baked dumpling; instead of folding the crust up and leaving the corners open, pat it with your hands so that you entirely inclose the apple. Just roll thepastry out once and then inclose the apples in it, and put the dumpling into the steamer; that is, an ordinary tin steamer; set over a pot of boiling water and steam the dumplings until they are done. You must decide that by running a trussing needle or knitting needle through the pastry into the apple. It may take an hour and a half to steam the dumplings; be sure they are done.
For another kind of pastry that has been described to me by enthusiastic gentlemen who used to have mothers, a kind of pastry “that melted in your mouth;” it is very easy to make that; not a flaky pastry, but a soft, exceedingly tender pastry that really crumbles. To do that you simply rub all of the shortening into the flour. Half a pound of shortening and a pound of flour; put the shortening into the flour with the salt; rub them with your hands till you have the shortening thoroughly mixed with the flour. It looks like meal; the ingredients must be thoroughly mixed, but not melted together; then use just enough cold water to make the pastry, and roll it out just once, and use it; be sure to keep it cool.
Question.Did you say an hour and a half for steamed dumpling?
Miss Corson.It will take nearly that, but you must try them; try them at the end of an hour. For the dumpling you can use one of the sauces I told you of yesterday morning, white cream sauce, or you can use simply powdered sugar, or powdered sugar mixed with a little cinnamon. You can use a hard sauce, which is butter and sugar mixed together in equal quantities, with any flavoring you like.
That is supposed to be the great abomination of American cooking, so that we are going now to see whether it can not be nearly as nicely fried as broiled. It seems a heresy, but it is true, and there are very many occasions where it is not possible to broil in an ordinary kitchen; the fire may not be good, or uncovering it may cool the oven. There is a very important secret in frying beefsteak, or chops, and that is to have the pan hot before you put the meat into it. It doesn’t make any difference what kind of a pan you use. Use the ordinary iron frying pan, the old-fashioned spider, or dripping pan, if you wish to; but have the pan hot; have the pan hot enough to sear theoutside of the meat directly it touches it; after the pan is hot put the beefsteak, or chops—because they are both cooked in the same way—into the hot pan. If the meat is entirely lean, if there is not a particle of fat on it, you may put not more than half a teaspoonful of butter in the pan; run it quickly over the bottom of the pan. But I never saw meat yet so lean, unless the fat was all trimmed off, that there was not fat enough to cook any chop or steak. The portion of fat you will usually find on meat is about one-third, unless you take the meat from the short loin; that is called the porterhouse, or tenderloin steak. In that case you have an excess of fat; there is more than one-third, reckoning in the kidney fat, or suet. You may cut away some of the fat, unless the butchers have cut it away. The butcher has already cut it away from thispiece, and, by the way, I notice that Minneapolis butchers cut a very long and thin steak. Now I would not advise the cooking, broiling or frying of that thin end. I would rather buy two steaks of that kind and cut off that and use it for stewing, because it would stew very nicely; broiled it will be rather tough.
As my frying pan is small I am going to cut the steak short. These steaks are cut too thin. A beefsteak to be nice should be over an inch thick—an inch and a half thick. You can easily economise on a thick steak by simply cutting it in halves, and using only as much of it as you want at once, because in almost any weather steak will keep at least over night. Have it too thick rather than too thin. Have it just the thickness you want and then cut it in two, using part only if you only need part of it. Trim off the outside skin, the tough skin; scrape the steak to make sure that there are no particles of bone on it. That bone, of course, comes in sawing the steak. Cut off the cartilage at the top of the steak, otherwise the steak may curl up. Have your pan hot enough to make it sear. Put the steak in and brown it quickly, first on one side and then on the other. In turning the steak run a knife or fork under it and lift it. Don’t stick a fork into it, because by doing that you make little holes in the fibre of the steak and so let the juice escape.
Question.Will you pound your steak?
MissCorson.No, decidedly not; that lets out the juice. You make little holes in the steak if you stick a fork into it, and by pounding you let the juice out. Now, you want to keep all the juice in the steak, all the juice that you can; so that, in turning the steak simply lift it with a fork or knife and turn it over;when it is brown on both sides push the frying pan back toward the back part of the fire, and finish cooking it until it is done to your taste. After it is brown on one side, turn it over; and then, after that, you can turn it once or twice; the frequent turning does not make any difference after you have got it browned on both sides and you can keep all the juice in. Turn it as soon as it is brown at first; have the hottest kind of a fire; get it brown on the under side as fast as you can; don’t be afraid of burning it; then turn it over and brown it on the other side; after that you can turn it as often as you please. Some people like their steak rare, some medium rare, and some well done. To test steak, do not cut into it to see if it is done, but press your finger on it, on the substance of the steak. If you do that quickly you won’t burn your finger. As long as the steak is very rare the fibre of the meat will be elastic, and directly you take your finger up the fibre will press up again; there will be no dent there. When it is medium rare just a little dent will remain from the pressure, because the fibre is less elastic. When it is well done you can press on it and make a little hollow that will stay there. Do not season the meat until after it is done; don’t put salt on any meat before cooking; you draw out the juice by salting it.
Now for the seasoning of the steak. I have already said that to apply salt to the cut fibre of meat will be sure to draw out the juice, so that you do not want to season a steak until it is done. When it is done season it with salt, pepper and butter. The quantities you use depend upon the taste. That rule applies whether steak is broiled or fried. On that plate you will see the drippings, all that was in the frying pan. There is no juice of the meat there; it is simply browned fat. Whatever juice there was in the meat is still there. Broiled steak is cooked on precisely the same principle. It is to be put just as near the fire as you can get it. After the broiled steak is browned on one side and then on the other, just as fast as you can brown it; don’t be afraid of burning it; you need to watch it; then move it away from the fire, and let it cook as much as you like. Test it in the same way I told you to test fried steak. When it is done put it on a hot dish; put butter, pepper and salt on it, and serve it hot.
Question.What do you do when the fat drops in the fire and blazes?
MissCorson.Of course it will do that, but that will helpbrown the steak. If it is possible to broil under the fire it is very much nicer. Sometimes the front of the stove is so arranged that you can let it down and run the gridiron under it; before you begin to broil over the fire you can get the top of the fire very red and clear by throwing a little salt upon it; that will help to destroy the odor. If the meat is frozen you should put it in cold water to thaw before cooking it; you can not avoid in that case washing the meat. To return to the matter of pounding steak: If you pound or break the fibre of meat in any way you let the juice escape; that makes the meat dry.
Question.What do you say to the notion that so many have, that pounding the meat makes it tender?
Miss Corson.You do nothing but break the fibre and save yourself the trouble of chewing the steak. To encourage laziness it is a very good idea. But remember, if you drive the juice out of the steak by pounding you destroy its nutriment. You need the juice in the steak. Now, there is a remedy for the toughness of steak, which I can give you, depending upon whether you like salad oil. If you do not, you ought to learn to, because it is one of the most nutritious and purest of the fats when it is perfectly good. Good sweet salad oil is preferable to any animal or vegetable fat for purposes of nutriment. There is no reason why you should not use salad oil on the score of health. A great many people object to it; they do not like the idea; they think it is rather foreign, and to some people it is distasteful, but they have very strong memories of childhood and another kind of oil. You know even that kind of oil in these days does not taste badly. Olive oil, the peanut oil, or lard oil, when they are fresh and sweet, are very desirable. To soften the fibre of the meat with vinegar and salad oil put on the platter about three tablespoonfuls of salad oil, and half a teacupful of vinegar and a pinch of pepper; no salt. Put these on the platter; then lay the raw steak on the platter, and let it stand at least an hour; then turn it over and let it stand another hour. The longer you can let it stand, if it is in the daytime, turning it over every hour, the tenderer you will make it. The vinegar makes the fibre of the meat tender, and the oil keeps it so. That is, the vinegar softens the fibre of the meat and the oil keeps it soft. If you want to prepare it for over night put it in the oil and vinegar about 6 o’clock, about supper time, and let it stand till bed time, then turn it over, and let it stand till morning. When you come to cook the steak do not wipe the oil and vinegar off; simply letwhat will run off, and then lay the meat on the gridiron and broil it, or fry it; there will be no taste perceptible if the oil is good.
A heaping tablespoonful of common brown sugar if you have it; if not, use any kind of sugar; put it in the frying pan and stir it until it is dark brown; that is, until it is on the point of burning; see that it browns evenly. Then put in a tablespoonful of water, either hot or cold—it does not make any difference; stir that until it is mixed with the sugar; then another tablespoonful, until you have used about half a cupful of water. If you should pour the water all in at once the sugar would simply boil over and burn you. Use about half a cupful of water, adding it gradually, and stirring until the burnt sugar is dissolved. That gives you the caramel. Now, while I am making the caramel, I will describe to you the clarifying of the soup.
To clarify soup stock: For each quart use the white and shell of one egg and one tablespoonful of cold water. Put the white and shell of the egg and the cold water into the bottom of the saucepan, and mix them together. Then put in the soup stock. Set the saucepan over the fire and let it boil gradually, stirring it every minute to mix the egg thoroughly so that it will not cake on the bottom of the pan before it begins to boil. When you have the stock made quite hot, when it begins to boil, then you do not need to stir it; but let it boil until the egg rises to the surface in the form of a thick, white scum, and the soup underneath looks perfectly clear, like sherry wine. Then strain it. When the egg is thick and white, as you see this, and the soup is clear underneath, set a colander in an earthen bowl, put a folded towel, doubled, in it, pour the soup into the bowl, and let it run through the colander without squeezing the towel. You see that is a repetition of the direction I gave you for straining the soup in the first place. The egg is in the towel. Now, I am going to put some of the soup into a goblet before coloring it, so that you can see the natural color. A light straw-color is the proper color for clear soup. You will very often find clear soupserved to you, even at nice hotels, much darker than that; as dark as what I am going to make now, which is the proper color for the luncheon soups calledbouillon. The coloring is a matter of taste. The clear soup, orconsomme, is to be served plain like that, or with the addition of any macaroni paste, or poached eggs, and then it takes its name from the additional ingredient which goes into the clear soup. Julienne soup is served with strips of vegetables in it, as I may tell you in some subsequent lesson.
Half a pound of shortening to a pound of flour, the shortening to be rubbed into the flour with the hands until it is so thoroughly mixed that it seems like meal, but not at all melted or softened; then just enough cold water to make a pastry which will roll out. Roll out the pastry and use it at once to line the pie plates. Fill the plates with sliced apples, or with any fruit or mince meat. To-day I shall use sliced apples. Sprinkle flour over the pastry, and then roll it out and line the plates; wet the lower crust to make the upper crust stick to it. Cut two or three little slits in the upper crust. Take care not to press the outer edges of the crust together. After the upper crust has been put on the pie brush it with beaten egg, if you wish it to be glossy when it is done. Then put it in a moderate oven and bake it for three-quarters of an hour, until you are very sure that the apple is done. You can tell that by trying the apple through the little cuts that you make in the pastry. This morning, in making pastry, you remember that we rolled and folded it a number of times. I simply roll this out once, just enough to get it thin enough to use for my pie. First roll out the pastry, and cut off the cover for the top of the pie. Lay it one side, and then roll out the rest and use it for the pie, as I have already directed. Use Greening apples if you can get them. These are table apples. They are not so good for pies for two or three reasons. They will not keep their form when they are baked in the pie, and they may not be perfectly tender. These will break and grow very soft as soon as they begin to cook.
I might, while I am making our pie, say a little about flourin general use in the family. As a rule I use what is called pastry flour, best for pie crusts. Pastry flour has more starch in it than ordinary family flour, or bread flour. The starch is the interior of the grain. The family flour is the grain ground entire, only the husk being removed. From grain ground in that way none of the nutritious elements are removed. You get a greater proportion of gluten, and some of the mineral elements of the grain that lie close to the husk; the flour that has an excess of gluten in it will absorb more water than pastry flour, or flour composed chiefly of starch, and it will make a tougher dough, either in the form of pie crust or bread than a flour which has the most starch in it. It is more nutritious than starchy flour, so that if you want tender, rather white pastry and bread, you must make up your minds to sacrifice some of the nutritious elements of the flour. All through the West the flour which is marketed is made, I think, from the entire wheat, and that is more thoroughly good, and more nutritious, than the so-called choice pastry flour. In the West you have a better flour than we at the East do, if we depend upon the Eastern mills. There are some very good brands of flour made in New York State, but as a rule they are not so full of gluten and not so nutritious as the Western flours. Where flour is made from winter wheat, which lies in the ground all winter long and gathers more of the mineral elements of the soil than spring wheat does, the flour is superior.
The pie is now heaped full of sliced apples by using about half a dozen rather small apples. I suppose you think this is a rather extravagant way to make a pie, but you do not need to put so many apples in unless you want to; we want a nice thick pie. This is cinnamon that I am using for flavoring. Put two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar on top of the apples in the pie. Finally brush the top of the pie, either with beaten egg or with a little sugar and water dissolved, and put it into the oven to bake.
Now take your recipe for bread making. Use the compressed yeast which you buy at the grocery store. For two small loaves of bread or a large pan of biscuit use a whole cake of yeast. Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water, a cupful of lukewarm water. Then add enough flour to form a thick batter; that will be about a cupful of flour; a thick batter which will cling to the mixingspoon when you lift the spoon and let a drop fall on the surface. Cover the bowl with a towel folded several times, or a thick cloth, so that all the heat can be retained. Then set the bowl somewhere near the fire, in a place not too hot to bear your hand, and let it stand for about half an hour, or until the batter is light and foamy. Keep the bowl covered all the time, and take care that you do not have it in too hot a place. Don’t have it in a place where you can not bear your hand. After the sponge—as the batter is called—is light and foaming, mix in another cupful of lukewarm water in which a teaspoonful of salt is dissolved. After the second cupful of lukewarm water with the teaspoonful of salt dissolved in it, add enough flour to form a dough stiff enough to knead with the hands. Knead the dough on the board for just five minutes. Some good housekeepers would declare that just five minutes’ kneading is flying in the face of Providence in the way of bread making, but I assure you it is enough. That is, it is enough to give you bread of a firm, fine grain, perfectly even in its consistency. It won’t be full of large, uneven holes; it will be firm, fine bread. After you have kneaded the bread five minutes make it up in a little loaf, or two loaves, as you like; put them in small iron pans, buttered—black iron bread pans—and set them again by the fire, where you can bear your hand, and let the little loaves of dough rise until they are just twice as large as when you put them down. That generally will take about half an hour if the yeast is good. Brush the loaves over the top with a little melted butter, or with a teaspoonful of sugar dissolved in water. Put them in the oven and bake them. The bread is to be baked until you can run a sharp knife or trussing needle in through the thickest part of the loaf without the bread sticking in any way. If the needle or knife comes out clean and bright the bread is done. It may take from half an hour to an hour to bake the bread. In the stove that I used the first morning over in the other building I have baked a loaf of bread, the size of those I am going to show you, in eleven minutes. I had not realized that bread could be baked thoroughly in so short a time, but one day in Northampton, Mass., one of my class timed the baking of the bread. A loaf of bread of that size was baked in eleven minutes. This same bread dough you can make up in the form of little rolls. I will make part of it up in rolls. Of course you will understand that the smaller the piece of dough the more rapidly it will rise the second time, and the quickeryou will be enabled to bake it. So if you are in a hurry, and want bread baked quickly, you will make it in the form of little rolls; when I make the rolls I will describe the process.
Question.Should bread be baked a long or a short time?
Miss Corson.The sooner it can be baked the better. There is no special object to be gained in the baking of bread except to thoroughly cook the dough. It can not affect the nutriment of the flour very much whether it takes a longer or a shorter time. The nutriment of the flour might be slightly wasted if it took a very long time. There is no objection to baking bread as quickly as it can be done.
Now before I begin to make the pudding I will answer a question that has been asked about the best yeast and the quick rising of bread. The object of raising bread is simply to make it digestible by separating the mass of the dough. If it is firm and solid, that is, if the bread is heavy, it can not be easily penetrated by the gastric juice, and consequently is indigestible. So that the most healthy bread is that which is sufficiently light and porous to allow the gastric juice to penetrate it easily. Only a mechanical operation is required to make the bread light. Now that process which will most quickly make the bread dough light is the most desirable. The longer you take to raise bread, the more slowly you raise, the more of the nutriment of the flour you destroy by the process of fermentation that lightens the bread. The yeast combining with water at a certain temperature causes fermentation, and from that fermentation carbolic acid gas is evolved, which forces its way up through the dough and fills it with little bubbles,—in other words, makes it light. Now the more quickly you can accomplish that fermentation, or rather lightening of the dough by the formation of little air cells, the more you will preserve the nutriment of the flour.
The idea prevails to some extent that if ladies use as much yeast as I have to-day the bread will taste of the yeast. It will not if the yeast is fresh. If the yeast is old or sour it will taste. But you can use as much as I have shown you and not have the bread taste after it is done. You see my object in using a great deal of yeast, proportionately, is to accomplish the lightening of the dough in a very short time. The best bread that ever was made or that ever was put on the market was raised mechanically, without the action of yeast; it was called aerated bread. It was bread dough lightened by a mechanical process. Carbonic acid gas was driven into the dough by machinery after theflour was mixed with salt water; and the bread made was very light and every particle of the nourishment preserved in that way.
Question.Do you ever put sugar in bread?
Miss Corson.You can put in anything you like. You can put sugar, or milk, or anything you like in the bread to vary it. I will use nothing to-day but yeast, flour, water, and salt. This is perfectly plain, wholesome bread. You put milk in bread and it makes it dry quicker. Vienna bread, which is made partly of milk, dries more quickly than any other bread that is made. You can make any variation you like from the recipe I have given you. I have given you a perfectly plain home-made bread.
Question.Do you ever scald the flour for bread?
Miss Corson.You can scald the flour if you wish, but you do not accomplish any special purpose by it. In the winter time, if you heat the flour before you mix it with yeast and warm water, you increase the rapidity with which the bread dough rises.
Question.How would you make brown bread—ordinary graham bread?
Miss Corson.Use graham flour; mix your white flour withit, if it is for graham bread proper; if it is for graham gems use simply graham flour, water and salt, beaten together. Graham flour, salt and water beaten together into a form and baked in little buttered tins is the graham bread pure and simple of the Grahamites. It is not necessary to knead bread more than once to secure lightness. I have already said that the longer you prolong the process of bread making the more of the nourishment of the flour you destroy. You will see when the bread is baked to-day, if we are fortunate in our baking, that the bread is perfectly light and of even grain.
Stale bread cut in slices or small pieces, fill a pudding dish of medium size, only three eggs, or if eggs are very dear, four tablespoonfuls of sugar, and a pint of milk, or enough more milk to saturate the bread. If the bread is very stale and dry you will have to use a pint and a half of milk. Three eggs, a pint of milk, four tablespoons of sugar, will make about a quart of liquid. The custard you pour over the bread; let the custardsoak into the bread; then on the top of the pudding put a layer of fruit about an inch thick. You may vary the fruit, using sliced apples, or dried apples which have been soaked over night, and then stewed tender, dried peaches treated in the same way, or canned peaches, canned pears—any fruit you like. In the summer, in berry season, use berries. If the fruit is sour sprinkle it with sugar; then put the pudding in the oven and bake it. You can use dried fruit with this pudding, such as raisins or currants, but you put the fruit in through the pudding instead of on top. If you want to make the pudding particularly good you will separate the white and yolks of the eggs, mix the yolks of the eggs with the milk and sugar; save the whites until the pudding is done; in that case you have to use a little more milk proportionately. Save the whites until the pudding is done, then beat them to a stiff froth and add to it three heaping tablespoons of powdered sugar, very gently mixing them, just as I mixed that light omelette yesterday. That makes what is called ameringue. Put themeringueover the top of the pudding after it is done; run it through the oven for about a minute, just long enough to color it slightly, and then serve the pudding.
If you want the pudding entirely smooth when it is done, you must break the bread up in the custard before you bake it. My way is simply to saturate the bread with the custard. You can beat it if you wish. The pudding will be slightly liquid, like bread pudding, and then the fruit, if it is juicy, makes it still more liquid, and if you add themeringue, that of itself is a sauce. You will notice, as a rule, that I make everything as plain as possible, because I wish to demonstrate that plain dishes cooked with simple and few materials, can be very good. Perforated tin pie plates bake very nicely. Of course you want to take care to have the bottom crust thick enough, so that none of the juice from fruit pies will run through. If the oven is very hot on the bottom, it will not do to set a pie on the very bottom; a grating must be used. You will have to use your judgment about baking, watching the pie, and taking care that it does not get burnt.
(Returning to the bread making, Miss Corson continued:)
Now I am going to put the second cup of water and flour into the dough. You want to remember, in raising bread, to keep it always at the same temperature until you get it light. It should be set where you can put your hand without burning. Keep the bowl, containing the sponge, just warm. You don’twant it anywhere where it will get so hot as to scald the sponge. You can set the bowl in winter over boiling water to keep the temperature equal.
(A question was asked in regard to rhubarb pie.)
Miss Corson.Some ladies put the rhubarb raw into the pies when they make rhubarb pies, trusting to its cooking while the crust is baking; others stew it with sugar before they put it in the pies. When it comes in from the market it should be cut in little pieces about half an inch long, and the outside, or thin skin, stripped off. It requires a great deal of sugar, whether you put it into the pie uncooked, or you first cook it. It makes an exceedingly nice acid pie. Usually the best way is to stew it first before you put it in the pie. That gives it to you in the form of a pulp. If you put it raw into the pie, to a certain extent the form is perfect, that is, it retains its little block-like shape after it is cooked.
(The bread now being ready to knead, Miss Corson recurred to that subject.)
I will take for the dough three cups of flour, about three heaping cupfuls besides the first one. There was an old adage to the effect that some imaginary substance called “elbow grease” was necessary in kneading bread. I presume that is another name for force. But there is no special strength necessary. The bread is kneaded for the purpose of entangling a little more air in it, and you accomplish that by folding and refolding it, as I am doing; just using enough flour to keep it from sticking to your hands. In five minutes you will find that you have a rather smooth, soft dough, that does not stick to your hands. That is all you want. You will always find perfectly good yeast in any town, or you can make the yeast yourself.
Question.If you use twice as much flour would you use twice as much yeast?
Miss Corson.If you want to raise the bread quickly you can increase the quantity of yeast in the same proportion that I have given it you here to-day, until you reach as much as six or seven pounds of flour, and then you would not need to use proportionately as much yeast. You could diminish the quantity a little. You see, the object of using plenty of yeast is to get the bread raised quickly.
Question.Doesn’t home-made yeast make heartier bread than the other?
Miss Corson.It makes bread less digestible—it may beheartier in that sense; the Irishman does not like his potatoes quite done; he thinks them heartier when they are somewhat indigestible. There could not be more nutritious or wholesome bread than this quickly raised bread. I have given you several very good reasons for raising bread as quickly as possible. Bread raised more slowly is not so nutritious, because some of the nutritive elements are destroyed in the fermentation which goes on in the slow process.
To make rolls, take small pieces of dough and make them round, and cut them nearly through the centre. Put the rolls in a buttered pan; cover them up with a cloth and let them rise double their original size, where you can bear your hand. Then bake them. Let the dough always rise until it is twice its size before baking. I think I have already explained to you that if you want the bread or roll glossy you can brush it with sugar and water, or melted butter. These rolls will be set on the top of the stove to rise, just like bread. As soon as they are twice their size they go into the oven to bake.
Question.Do you ever use any shortening in the rolls?
Miss Corson.You can use it if you want to. Knead butter in the part of the dough that is designed for rolls—say a tablespoonful of butter; put it in when you are doing the five minutes’ kneading. There is no reason why you should not knead in anything that your fancy calls for, providing it is edible.
Now I will show you how you can prevent the juice running out of fruit pies. For fruit pies—pies made in the summer time, of juicy fruits—better use no under crust. Take a deep dish; put the fruit into the dish, heaping it a little, just as I heaped the apples; wet the edges of the dish with cold water; lay the pastry on the dish and press it very slightly,not on the edge itself, because that makes the pastry heavy, but just inside of the edge. As I press it I leave the edge intact; press the pastry against the dish all the way round; then with your finger make a little groove all the way round your pie, inside the edge of the crust; then, with a little knife, cut holes in the groove. Now, when the juice of the fruit boils out, as it will, instead of forcing its way out of the edges, the crust will be held upon the wet dish, and the fruit juice will boil out in the little groove and stay there. To serve the pie, you cut the upper crust with a sharp knife, and serve with a spoon, taking a piece of crust and plenty of fruit out on each plate. No under crust is there. If you have an under crust with very juicy pie it will be prettysure to be soggy and heavy. The English way of serving these pies is a very nice one, and is, as I have described, with whipped cream. Serve whipped cream with a fruit pie. Among other nice things that we can not get in this country is Devonshire cream, which is a cream almost as thick as the hard sauce you make by mixing powdered sugar and egg together; it is thick enough almost to cut. We can not get that cream here, but use thick, nice cream, sweetened or not, as you like. One of my English friends, who first taught me this way of serving pie, said that at her home they never sweetened the cream; they simply whipped it to a froth and served it piled up on a dish by the side of the pie. The pie was taken out on a plate, and then two or three spoonfuls of this whipped cream laid on the plate by the side of the pie. You can sweeten it if you like.
I will next make ameringue. I have already told you to use the whites of three eggs, three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar—and that really must be pulverized very fine and sifted. In beating the eggs you can always get them light very quickly, if they are reasonably cold in the beginning, by beating with a change of movement. Beat until your hand grows tired, and then simply change the way you hold the beater. Don’t stop beating. Of course you can use any kind of an egg-whip you like. This which I use is made of twisted wire. Only take care to have the egg beaten entirely stiff. Do not have any liquid egg in the bottom of the bowl. In the summer time you can cool the egg by putting in a little pinch of salt if it does not beat stiff at once. I would not advise using an egg that had the least odor about it. As soon as the custard in the pudding is done we are going to take the pudding out of the oven, and put themeringueon the top, whether the apples are done or not. It does not do any harm to stop beating for awhile. Mix this, using a cutting motion, not a stirring motion. Mix until the sugar and egg are smoothly blended, and themeringueis ready to use.
Our lesson this morning is cream of salmon; shoulder of lamb, boned and roasted; force meat or stuffing for roast meats; potatoes, boiled and baked; and cheese crusts. I shall begin with the lamb or mutton.
Remove the bone first, then stuff and bake the meat, as I have no facilities for roasting with this stove; but I will have something to say about the process of roasting in the course of the lesson. A great many of the ladies think that the shoulder or fore quarters of meat is not so desirable a piece for use as the loin or hind quarter, but that is a mistake. In the first place the proportion of bone in the fore quarter is very much less than in the hind quarter. In one lesson that I gave, about a week ago, at Cleveland, I had a butcher remove all the bones from a fore quarter weighing between five and six pounds, and then weighed the bones: They weighed a pound and a quarter. I also had him remove the bones from the hind quarters and weighed them, and they weighed more. The meat of the fore quarter is sweeter, and quite as nutritious as the meat of the hind quarter, and the fore quarter is always cheaper. So that, you see, on the score of flavor and economy, the fore quarter is more desirable for use than the hind quarter. In England, where mutton is always in perfection, it is the fore quarter or shoulder of mutton that is served to guests, and the hind quarter is the one that is used for the family dinner.
To make the dish which I am going to prepare this morning, I have had the whole quarter brought in so that I can show you how the shoulder should be cut off. Simply with a large piece of the outside skin attached. Usually the butcher might cut the shoulder square off close, but I want this large piece of skin for stuffing. There is a natural division between the shoulder and the ribs, so that the shoulder comes off with perfect ease. If you buy an entire fore quarter like that you will have the butcher cut off the shoulder for roasting or baking, then let him cut the neck in rather small pieces for stews or mutton broth. What is called the rack or ribs would be cut into chops for broiling or frying, and the breast would be cut off entire to be stewed or roasted or baked. A very nice way to prepare the breast is to have the bones all taken out, spread a layer of nice forcemeat or stuffing over it, roll it up, and tie it. Then it can be baked, or roasted, or stewed. Another nice way to cook the breast is to boil it until it is tender enough to enable you to pull the bones out without any difficulty; then take out all the bones, put it on a platter, set another platter on top of it with a heavy weight on the top platter, and press it until it is cold. Then cut it in rather small pieces, about two or three inches square, and bread and fry it.The process of breading and frying is accomplished in this way. You have cracker crumbs—cracker crumbs rolled and sifted—or bread crumbs, stale bread, dried in the oven and rolled and sifted, in a large dish. In another dish beat a couple of eggs until they are liquid. It does not need to be frothy, but simply to have the substance of the egg well broken; then dip the little pieces of boiled lamb, first in the cracker dust, then in the beaten egg, then again in the cracker dust. That is called breading. To fry properly, so that you have no grease, you want the frying kettle half full of fat. You don’t want a little fat in a frying pan, but a frying kettle like that which you use in frying doughnuts. Put the kettle over the fire and let the fat get hot, that is, let it get so hot that it begins to smoke. When the fat begins to smoke you plunge whatever article you wish to fry into it. If you take the precaution to do that, have plenty of fat and let it get smoking hot and then fry in it, you will never have anything greasy. The action of the hot fat at once so carbonizes the surface of what you wish to fry, and prevents the soaking of the fat. Fry whatever article you are treating until it is a light brown, then take it out of the fat with a skimmer, and lay it on brown paper for a moment—coarse brown paper—and that will absorb the very little fat on the surface. It will be perfectly free from grease. You can season before you bread an article, or you can season the bread crumbs or cracker dust which you use in breading, just as you like. Or, after the article is fried you can season it with salt and pepper. Some things are seasoned after the frying—for instance, Saratoga potatoes—they are always salted after frying. You can make bread crumbs very fine by using a fine sieve and sifting. If you have cracker meal already prepared you will see that it is as fine as Indian meal; it is sold in the grocery stores and at the cracker factories, and it is cheaper to buy cracker dust or cracker meal than it is to make it at home, if you buy the whole crackers, because, of course the manufacturers can afford to use their broken crackers—they are allperfectly good—in making cracker meal and sell that very much cheaper than they can sell the whole crackers. The question of the digestibility of fried articles of food is very often raised. You understand that the hard fried surface is less digestible than any soft surface, and many fried articles are indigestible because of the quantity of grease they contain. If you fry in the way I have told you, you will not have that excess of grease.
To take the bone from the shoulder, first cut from the inside and take out the shoulder blade, cutting from the inside, avoiding as far as possible cutting through the skin on the outside. The butcher will always do this for you probably, if you tell him about what you want done. First, the shoulder blade is taken out, then the bone which follows down along the leg. After the shoulder blade is taken out put it into a kettle of water, over the fire, and boil it for awhile until you can scrape all the meat off of it. You will have to use it in finishing the dish. After taking out the shoulder blade the cutting must all be done from the inside. There will be two or three places where you may possibly cut through the skin, where it is drawn very close over the bone, but cut as little as possible. When the meat is freshly killed before the skin is dried, you may not always cut through there, but where the skin is dried fast to the bone you will have to. This may seem a slight waste of time, but this dish is desirable for several reasons. In the first place, the bone being entirely taken out you can carve it without any waste whatever and with a great deal ofease. In the next place it gives you a very ornamental dish. In fact, I am going to show you how to make a duck out of it. And as I say, if you get the butcher to do it, it will not make any difference to you if it does take time.
Always in sewing meat or poultry, ladies, take very large stitches, not with fine thread. Use cord, so that you can see where the threads are when the meat is done. Any kind of a large needle will answer for sewing, large enough to carry your cord. Always leave long ends too.
To stuff the meat, season it nicely with pepper and salt and any herb that you are going to use in making stuffing. Sage, of course, would be very good with fat meat; put onion in the stuffing to make it imitate duck. For a force meat of bread, a teaspoonful of chopped onion; fry it in a tablespoonful of butter until it is light brown. While the onion is frying soak a cupful of stale bread in cold water until it is soft, then squeeze out the water. Put the soaked bread with the fried onion, add ateaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of any herb that you decide for seasoning, any dried sweet herb, half a saltspoonful of pepper, and stir all these ingredients over the fire until they are scalding hot. Use that force meat for stuffing any kind of meat or poultry. Of course there are a great many ways of making force meats; this is only one, and a very simple one. Another good stuffing for duck or for this dish, if you wish it more closely to imitate duck, would be to increase the quantity of onion—use much more onion, half a cupful of onion, or even more when you want to make onion stuffing. Another way is to use dry bread without cooking, a chopped onion, herbs, butter; some ladies like to put an egg in stuffing. There are a great many different methods of making it. Cold, chopped meat is very nice added to stuffing or dressing.
After the shoulder is stuffed thus, run a needle entirely round the edge in a large, over-hand stitch, so that you can draw it up like a purse; stitches at least an inch and a half long. That draws the edge up. Then take two or three stitches in such a way as to hold the stuffing in. Remember always to leave long ends in tying the cord used in sewing. Then curl the leg up like the neck of a duck and fasten with a cord. After it is prepared like that it is to be put into a pan in the oven, or before a hot fire, and browned quickly on the outside. It may be seasoned after it is browned. There will be a little drippings in the pan; baste it with the drippings; bake it or roast it, allowing, if you want it well done, about twenty minutes to the pound. A shoulder like that will weigh about two pounds and a half or three pounds. It will do in an hour’s time in a pretty quick oven; in an hour and a half in a moderate one. Use no water in the baking pan, because water never can get as hot as the fat outside of the meat. The temperature of the hot fat is higher than the temperature of hot water, and the result of putting water around meat in a baking pan is to draw out the juice. The object is to keep all the juice in the meat. You will always find that there will be drippings enough from any ordinary cut of meat for the purpose of basting. If you have an absolutely lean piece of meat pour about a couple of tablespoonfuls of drippings, or butter, in the baking pan, but no water, and use the drippings for basting. A nice gravy is very easily made from the drippings in the pan. I will tell you about that later. If the meat appears to be baking too quickly, if there is any danger of its burning, put a sheet of buttered paper over it.Baste the meat every fifteen or twenty minutes. You can drench it with flour, just before basting, if you want to. That gives it a rough surface. The flour browns with the fat. If you are basting with water of course the flour would not brown so quickly. I think I have given you good reasons for not basting it with water.
A cupful of boiled salmon separated from the skin and bone and rubbed through a sieve with a potato masher, mixed with a quart of cream soup, gives you cream of salmon. Any of the ladies who have seen cream sauce made will understand the making of the cream soup. Put a slice of salmon that will make a cupful, over the fire in enough boiling water to cover it, with a heaping tablespoonful of salt, and boil it until the flakes separate. That will be perhaps ten minutes. Watch it a little. When the flakes separate drain it, take away the skin and bones and put it into a fine colander or stout wire sieve, and rub it through with a potato masher.
Question.Do you use canned salmon?
Miss Corson.Yes, you can use canned salmon. That is already cooked, and you simply would rub it through the sieve. The fresh salmon is to be boiled in salted water. If you use canned salmon you do not need to boil it. After the salmon is rubbed through the sieve it is calledpureeor pulp of salmon.
Now to make a quart of cream soup: For each quart of soup put in the sauce pan a heaping tablespoonful of butter, a heaping tablespoonful of flour; put them over the fire and stir them until they are quite smooth. Then begin to add hot milk, half a cupful at a time, stirring each half cupful smoothly with the butter and flour before you add any more, till you have added a quart, or if milk is scarce a pint of milk and a pint of water. If you haven’t any milk at all, a quart of water. That gives you a white soup, if you add simply water; if you add milk it is called cream soup. If you are very fortunate and have lots of cream, in place of some of the milk, use cream, and then you will have genuine cream soup. After the milk or water is all added, then season the soup palatably with salt and pepper—white pepper. I have told you about white pepper. It is to be had at all the grocery stores; it costs no more than black pepper and is very much nicer for any white soup or white sauce. Salt and pepperto taste, and a very little grated nutmeg; a quarter of a saltspoonful, a little pinch of grated nutmeg. After the soup is seasoned stir in the salmon. I have told you already how to prepare the salmon. Stir the soup constantly until it boils for a couple of minutes. By that time you will find that the salmon is stirred smoothly all through it. Then it will be ready to serve, and it is very good. You can use any other kind of fish in the same way, and your soup will take its name from the fish that you use. Halibut or codfish, trout or any fish. Only remember if you want the soup to be white you must use the white part of the fish. For instance, if you had a large dark fish you would want to take off the brown parts and use only the white parts. Otherwise the brown parts of the fish will color the soup. You can use cream soup as the basis for vegetable soups that are very nice. Prepare the vegetables in the same way; boil them, and rub them through a sieve with a potato masher. Then stir them into the cream soup. Use asparagus, celery, cucumbers, green peas, string beans, Jerusalem artichokes,—those little root artichokes,—any vegetable, in fact, varying the quantity of vegetable in this way. You will find that some vegetables will give a much more decided flavor than others. For instance, celery has a very strong flavor, and cucumbers have rather a decided flavor. You want to use enough vegetables to flavor the soup, if it is a white vegetable. If it is a vegetable that has a decided color like carrots, for instance, or beets,—by the way, beets make a delicious soup, and a very pretty one is made with spinach,—you want to use enough to color the soup. The beets, boiled so that all the color is preserved, and then rubbed through a sieve, make a very pretty soup. One of our New York pupils calls it a “pink velvet soup.” Spinach makes a very nice green soup if it is properly boiled. We shall try to get some spinach for one of the lessons. We havepureeof spinach on our list, and if we can get any spinach I will show you how to boil it so as to keep its color.