Juliet Corson

“ On the score of economy there is no food which can be as cheaply prepared as soup—that is, no palatable, enjoyable, nutritious food. It is possible to make this soup, this thick soup which I am making now, in New York, and here also, I suppose, for less than ten cents a gallon, buying the materials at retail; and I am sure a gallon of this soup will go very far towards satisfying one’s hunger. ”

“ Habitually, Americans do not use soup. Some have grown gradually accustomed to have soup as a part of their every-day dinner, but as a rule people have it once or twice a week. I am speaking now of average families. As a matter of fact, it ought to be used every day, because it is not only a very easy form in which to obtain nourishment, but you obtain from soup that which you would not get from any other dish; that is, you get every particle of the nourishment there is in the ingredients which you put into the soup. ”

“ We Americans have, as a rule, the idea that there is no nutritious food except meat. We think that we get all our nourishment from meat; and the other things—the vegetables and bread, and all those other articles of food that we eat, are what the dressmakers would call “trimmings.” We do not regard them as real nourishing food, when in reality there are some vegetables which are nearly as nutritious as meat. Take for instance, lentils; I do not know if you are familiar with them. They are a variety of vetch or field pea, little flat, dried peas, that grow very abundantly ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We made a beef stew one day, here, I think. Roasting is cooking meat before the direct blaze of the open fire. Baking is cooking it in the oven. Nearly all the so-called roast beef that we get is baked beef. It is not quite so delicate as real roast beef. You can accomplish the roasting of beef with any range or kitchen stove that has a large grate, that is, a grate where you can have a clear surface of coals against the grate, by using what is called a Dutch oven. ”

“ 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 wish to add the feet, you will scald them and scrape off the skin. Then cut off the ends of the claws, and you have the feet perfectly clean; put them with the gizzard, liver and heart to boil as the basis of your gravy. The French people always save all the feet of all kinds of poultry. They prepare them in this way and put them into soups; sometimes they cook them till the bones grow gelatinous, till they are very soft and tender; they dress them with sauce and serve them as what they call an entree or side dish. They make a dish which is more delicate than pigs’ feet. ”

“ I have not graded the different articles of food, but some day when we have more time I will give you a table of nutritive values of different articles of food so that you can form some comparison in your own mind. Remember this, that meat is not the only nutritious article of food in use, and we only need a certain quantity of it. ”

“ If you soak the peas over night you destroy a small portion of their nutritive properties; especially if you make the soup in warm water, there will be a slight fermentation. The object of soaking them over night is simply to soften them, and as you can soften them in this way you accomplish the same purpose by adding cold water gradually. You will notice that this is for perfectly plain pea soup. You can vary it by adding bones of cold ham, or of cold roast beef; you can boil the bones with the peas. In that way you get the flavor of whatever meat you add. ”

“ Now I will give you a recipe for corned beef hash. Yesterday we spoke about boiling corned beef. You will take cold corned beef and boiled potatoes, either hot or cold, about equal quantities. Sometimes people like a little more potato than meat. Mix the meat and potato together; add just enough water or broth to moisten the meat and potato. Season palatably with salt and pepper and butter; have the hash nicely mixed together; put into the frying pan; suppose you have a quart of hash, about two tablespoonfuls of butter and let it get hot, then put in the hash. ”

“ If you buy a copper sauce pan you have got something that lasts you all your life, and you can leave it as an heirloom; if you don’t want to do that, you can sell it for old copper for nearly as much as you paid for it. In using copper, you must never let them become bare on the inside. If the tin wears off and the copper is exposed to any acid in the food cooked, it is apt to form a poisonous combination. But with proper care and cleanliness, copper sauce pans are perfectly safe. ”

“ In baking potatoes, the same general principles apply. That is, at the moment when the potatoes are tender—and that of course depends upon the oven in which you bake them—the starch cells are ruptured and the moisture is at the point of escaping if you give it vent by slightly breaking the potato, then the potatoes will keep mealy for a little while. But baked potatoes deteriorate every moment they stand after they are tender. You should serve baked potatoes just the moment they are done, if you want them to be perfect. ”

“ A great deal of codfish in these days is sent to the market without either skin or bone. Supposing we have the regulation dried codfish, we skin and bone it, then soak it over night in cold water, and next morning put it over the fire in more cold water, plenty of it, and put the kettle or pan containing the fish and the cold water on the back part of the stove, where it will heat very gradually. Do not let it boil at all, but keep it at a scalding heat. Do not more than let it simmer. The effect of the boiling on any salted fibre, whether it is fish or meat, is simply to harden it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After the onion is peeled stick a dozen whole cloves into it. The cloves are added to the soup for the purpose of flavoring it. You very often hear the remark made that the cookery of certain people has an indefinable taste, exceedingly nice, but something that you do not exactly understand. It is always produced by a combination of seasonings and flavorings. In this soup I shall use for seasoning not only the cloves in the onions, but a dozen peppercorns—that is, unground grains of pepper, instead of ground pepper, because I want the soup to be perfectly clear. ”

“ You know that it is very troublesome to dislodge them, but the salt kills them, and of course you can wash them out. As long as they are alive they cling there. If you sprinkle salt on the leaves it will wither them, but if you put it in the water it will not. Salted water is intensely cold, you know, and it would restore the freshness of the leaves of lettuce, even if they were wilted, unless they were really on the verge of decay. If you will remind me, after I have finished giving the recipe for cooking the vegetables, I will tell you how to keep lettuce fresh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Remember, ladies, always, that to broil you should use the hottest fire you can get—the hottest and the clearest fire, because part of the success of broiling depends upon quickly cooking the outside, while the inside of anything you are broiling still remains juicy. If you had a wood fire you would broil over the fire. If you broil over the fire you must expect the blaze to rise, and you must naturally suppose the meat will be smoked ”