Modern cookery for private families

and carrots prepared by the directions of page 20, or turned into any other shape that may be preferred, with rather less of the solid part of some white celery stems, and of leeks or of very mild onions[39] mixed. The latter must, if used, be sliced, drawn into rings, and divided into slight shreds. When these have simmered from twenty to thirty minutes, add the leaves of one or two lettuces and a few of sorrel, trimmed or torn, about the size of half-a-crown. Continue the gentle boiling until these are tender, and add at the moment of serving half a pint of asparagus-points boiled very green, and as many French beans cut into small lozenges, and also boiled apart; or substitute green peas for these last. Footnote 39: Only a very _subdued_ flavour of these is, we think, admissible for a delicate vegetable soup of any kind. For the _Julienne_ soup, first stew the carrots, &c. tolerably tender in a couple of ounces of butter; pour the stock boiling to them; skim off all the fat from the surface, and finish as above. Sprigs of chervil, spinach (boiled apart, and sparingly added), green onions, very small tufts of brocoli or cauliflower, may all be used in these soups at choice. Both the kind and the proportion of the vegetables can be regulated entirely by the taste. Bread stamped out with a _very small_ round cutter, and dried a pale brown in the oven, is added sometimes to this spring soup, but is, we should say, no improvement. Winter vegetables should have three or four minutes’ previous boiling (or blanching) before they are put into the soup. AN EXCELLENT GREEN PEAS SOUP. Take at their fullest size, but before they are of bad colour or worm-eaten, three pints of fine large peas, and boil them as for table (see Chapter XVII.) with half a teaspoonful of carbonate of soda in the water, that they may be very green. When they are quite tender, drain them well, and put them into a couple of quarts of boiling, pale, but _good_