The number of onions must depend upon taste; if 10 or 12, chop and stew them, in a saucepan, with a good piece of butter; stew them gradually, and when done, add some good stock: salt, pepper, and cayenne, if the stock be not already seasoned. This may be strained, and a pint of boiling cream added, to make it more delicate.—Another: cut small silver onions in rings, fry them of a light colour, drain and cook them for twenty minutes in clear gravy soup. Serve toasted sippets.
Fry in clarified butter 12 large onions, 2 heads of celery, a large carrot and a turnip, all chopped. When soft, pulp them through a sieve, into 2 quarts of boiled water, thickened with 4 or 5 oz. of butter, worked up with potato flour, and seasoned with mace and white peppercorns, 2 lumps of sugar, or you may thicken with the beat yolks of 4 eggs. Bread sippets in the tureen.
An old-fashioned, but good receipt. Boil quite soft, 3 pints of green peas, and work them through a hair sieve. Put into the water in which the peas were boiled, 3 large slices of ham, a small knuckle of veal, a few beet leaves shred small, a turnip, 2 carrots, and a little more water. Boil an hour and a half. Then strain the liquor into a bowl, and mix it with the pulp. Put in a little juice of spinach, which is obtained by squeezing the spinach, after it has been boiled, through a cloth. This will give a good colour. Then give it a gentle boil, to take off the taste of the spinach, slice in the whitest part of a head of celery, and a lump of sugar the size of a walnut. Cut a slice of bread into little square pieces, a slice of bacon in the same manner, and fry together in fresh butter, of a light brown. Cut a large lettuce in slices, fry that, after the other, then put them all together into the tureen. Have ready boiled, a pint of young peas, put them also into the tureen, and pour the soup over.—Onions may be added if approved.—Serve toasted bread, and also dry powdered mint.
