Kettner's book of the table : a manual of cookery : practical, theoretical, historical.

  • Dallas, E. S. (Eneas Sweetland), 1828-1879.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Kettner's book of the table : a manual of cookery : practical, theoretical, historical. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    444/517 (page 436)
    to his guests they would want little else—whitebait and a grouse. It has been reckoned that there are about five hundred kinds of soup ; but this number is reached by giving the dignity of a separate receipt to every little variation. Thus there are a dozen sorts of Italian paste—vermicelli, maca- roni, nouilles, lasagnes, and the rest. Each of these put into a clear gravy gives rise to a different soup. If we put into the very same fluid sago or tapioca, bread or rice or barley, a puree of potatoes or peas, carrots or turnips, tomatos or Jerusalem artichokes—we are supposed in- stantly to create a new soup. It would he a waste of time to attempt to enumerate all the possible combinations of solids and liquids that may he called soup. The solids are innumerable : the liquids are reducible to six—water, milk, wine, and the ^juices of beef, veal, and fowl. The cook finds the first three of these made to his hand; and his chief business as a soupmaker is to produce the most nutritive and tasteful broths from the viands furnished by the ox, by his nephew the calf, and by poultry. He has also other animals at command—such as mutton, game, and fish ; but his grand resources for the stockpot are beef, veal, and fowl. From these he produces four different broths—two simple and two double—which are the founda- tions of nearly all the soups that can be imagined : 1. Beef broth or bouillon ; 2. Double broth or consomme ; 3. Veal stock or gravy (in French blonde de veau—another double broth) ; and 4. Fowl broth which is simple. This looks plain enough, and so it is ; but the reader who will compare the cookery books will soon find himself lost in a confusion of receipts with a puzzling variety of names for the foundation-broths or gravies. It is because cookery, though a science, is not and cannot be an exact science ; while at the same time the professors of cookery propound their receipts as if it were exact. They give a receipt with so much particularity that they have to