THICK SOUPS AND PURÉES.
in the mortar is then reduced to a minimum, and the pounded meat will soon be ready to pass through the sieve.
In using the sieve, by the way, caution your cook that she must always put whatever she wishes to pass through it, at the shallow end; placing the sieve over a large bowl, or dish, big enough to receive it, and rubbing the purée through it with a large wooden spoon. From time to time she must invert the sieve, and scrape off the portion of the purée which always adheres to the reverse side of the hair, or wire. A cook must be patient in the use of this utensil, and achieve her object by perseverance, rather than by boisterous work. If you bear too heavily on the hair, your sieve will soon bulge, and ere long the hair will part company from the wooden cylinder to which it is attached.
The work of both pounding in the mortar and passing through the sieve is rendered easier by the addition of a little butter or stock during the process.
Purées, as soups, are prepared in this way :—You first must make as good a bowl of stock as you can from bones, meat scraps, &c., as already described for common stock. “Second boilings” of soup-meat and bones will do for many of them, while excellent purées maigres can be made on a milk or vegetable stock basis, a good recipe for which will be found at the end of this chapter. A decoction in which ham or bacon bones have been used with some of the boilings of a piece of salt beef, if not too salt, will moisten purées of peas, lentils, &c., satisfactorily.
Suppose, now, that you want to make potage à la Crécy, which in plain terms is carrot purée :—Fry half a pound of sliced carrots and four ounces of onions also sliced with an ounce of butter for five minutes; add a pint of the stock made as afore-said; simmer till the vegetables are thoroughly done, then drain them, mash them up, and pass them through the sieve. Now, add to the pulp so obtained sufficient additional stock to make a purée a little thinner than you wish your soup eventually to be. Melt half an ounce of butter at the bottom of a saucepan, and work half an ounce of flour into it, gradually