The best and cheapest method of making a nourishing soup, is least known to those who have most need of it; it will enable those who have small incomes and large families to make the most of the little they possess, without pinching their children of that wholesome nourishment which is necessary for the purpose of rearing them up to maturity in health and strength.
The labouring classes seldom purchase what are called the coarser pieces of meat, because they do not know how to dress them, but lay out their money in pieces for roasting, &c., of which the bones, &c. enhance the price of the actual meat to nearly a shilling per pound, and the diminution of weight by roasting amounts to 32 per cent. This, for the sake of saving time, trouble, and fire, is generally sent to an oven to be baked; the nourishing parts are evaporated and dried up, its weight is diminished nearly one-third, and all that a poor man can afford to purchase with his week's earnings, perhaps does not half satisfy the appetites of himself and family for a couple of days.
If a hard-working man cannot get a comfortable meal at home, he soon finds his way to the public-house, the poor wife contents herself with tea and bread and butter, and the children are half starved.
DR. KITCHINER'S receipt to make a cheap, nutritive, and palatable soup, fully adequate to satisfy appetite and support strength, will open a new source to those benevolent housekeepers who are disposed to relieve the poor; will show the industrious classes how much they have it in their power to assist themselves; and rescue them from being dependent on the precarious bounty of others, by teaching them how they may obtain an abundant, salubrious, and agreeable aliment for themselves and families, for one penny per quart. See page 210.
For various economical soups, see Nos. 204, 239, 240, 224, 221, and _Obs._ to Nos. 244 and 252, and Nos. 493 and 502.
_Obs._ Dripping intended for soup should be taken out of the pan almost as soon as it has dropped from the meat; if it is not quite clean, clarify it. See receipt, No. 83.
Dripping thus prepared is a very different thing from that which has remained in the dripping-pan all the time the meat has been roasting, and perhaps live coals have dropped into it.[209-*]