Review: A cookbook from the past
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 30, 2011
This is an interesting cookbook because it's historical.  The author was a professional caterer at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia and the Astor House in New York.  The cookbook of soups is from 1884.The author tells us that it is best to choose the "bill of fare" first, then decide on the soup in order to display good taste and judgment.  Soups are divided into clear, thick, purees, bisques and chowders.  There is a recipe for "Liebig's Soup" which calls for half an onion, celery, a sliced carrot, salt, pepper and a very little bit of mace.  Boil in two quarts of water for half an hour, strain and add to the water two tablespoons of Liebigs Extract of Meat and whisk throughly, taste for seasoning and serve.  I became curious about Liebig's Extract of Meat and looked it up to find out that it was a paste-like extract of meat used extensively in Europe in cooking and also for nourishment for sick people and in WWII.  Liebig's eventually became Oxo cubes and in the latter part of the 20th century the company was bought by Unilever.  This soup actually sounds pretty good, and very nourishing.The most interesting is the section on Exotic Soups.  There is Green Turtle Soup, which the author said is imagined by the housewife as too expensive to make. A live turtle can be purchased at the Fulton market for 10 to 20 cents a pound to make the soup.  The recipe is long and complicated, and I wouldn't have the stomach to make it myself as the turtle must be killed as the first step and proceding steps aren't pleasant.  Mock turtle soup uses a calf's head with the brain removed, the head boiled, and then the meat removed, and that is also a long recipe.There are recipes for stock soups, vegetable soups, macaroni soup and many others.  They are not laid out like our recipes today, but are in paragraph form and a little of this and a little of that makes up the recipe.  Some of these might sound unpalatable to us in 2011, but I think it has always been true that whatever is available to eat, then that is what we eat.  These are the recipes of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as is mentioned in the beginning of the book.  I like it very much for the history of cooking soups in the east in the late 1800's, and I think that there are people who do most of their cooking from scratch who would appreciate some of the recipes.  I wouldn't mind trying a few myself.