1885 New Guide Hotel Bar Restaurant

THE NEW GUIDE FOR HOTELS, ETC.

204

CHAPTER III.

General Remarks on Soups.

OUPS as prepared at the average English Hotel and O Eating Houses, are perhaps not the best liquid pre- parations of the kind one could wish. There are houses where good soups of course may be had, and little eating houses, where a far 'more palatable compound may be had for 4d. than is to be procured at some of the more stylish and fashionable Hotels or Restaurants. Take for instance the little a la mode Beef '^ho^ not far from Regent Circus and The Pavilion. It is one of the resorts of London, and indeed a few pennies are well expended on a good potage. It is evidently not prepared from dish washings, or semiputrid meat. Nor the water in which a ham has been boiled, just thickened with knots of uncooked flour, a preparation for which I paid 6d. in Fleet Street. A soup ought really to be a decoction of meat, or vege- tables, as the case may be. Water is a powerful absorber, vide the mineral waters, as iron, chalybeate magnesia, &c., of the spas, produced by the water absorbing as it passes over or through beds of these substances, the active and soluble principles of these minerals. Soup is supposed to be the water or milk, which has extracted from meat and vegetables, either singly or altogether, their soluble parts. For this reason a slow process is quite imperative. Cold water is placed in the vessel, and the meats or vegetables, or both, are subjected to gentle gradual heat. Much in the same way as the wives of the Swiss cowherd or farmer, prepare their butter for keeping. It ought not to reach to boiling point under two hours. It rises gradually to 212^ F,