Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery: A Manual of Cheap and Wholesome Diet

amount of nutriment can be extracted from the bran, which also imparts colour. For the purpose of colouring clear soups, however, there is nothing in the world to compare with what French cooks call _caramel_. Caramel is really burnt sugar. There is a considerable art in preparing it, as it is necessary that it should impart colour, and colour _only_. When prepared in the rough-and-ready manner of burning sugar in a spoon, as is too often practised in English kitchens, this desideratum is never attained, as you are bound to impart sweetness in addition to a burnt flavour. The simplest and by far the most economical method of using caramel is to buy it ready-made. It is sold by all grocers under the name of Parisian Essence. A small bottle, costing about eightpence, will last a year, and saves an infinite loss of time, trouble, and temper. By far the most economical soups are the thick, where all the ingredients can be rubbed through a wire sieve. Thick soups can be divided into two classes--ordinary brown soup, and white soup. The ordinary brown is the most economical, as in white soups milk is essential, and if the soup is wished to be very good it is necessary to add a little cream. Soups owe their thickness to two processes. We can thicken the soup by adding flour of various kinds, such as ordinary flour, corn-flour, &c., and soup can also be thickened by having some of the ingredients of which it is composed rubbed through a sieve. This class of soups may be called Purees. For instance, Palestine soup is really a puree of Jerusalem artichokes; ordinary pea soup is a puree of split peas. In making our ordinary vegetarian soups of all kinds, as a rule, all the ingredients should be rubbed through a sieve. The economy of this is obvious on the face of it. In the case of thickening soup by means of some kinds of flour, for richness and flavour there is nothing to equal ordinary flour that has been cooked. This is what Frenchmen call