Soup Meat
To make the soup very good, the meat [one pound meat per quart of water] must remain in till it drops entirely from the bones and is boiled [two hours] to rags [easily shredded]. But none of these fragments and shreds should be found in the tureen [a broad, deep dish, preferably covered] when the soup is sent to table; they [meat and bones] should all be kept at the bottom of the pot, pressing down the ladle hard upon them when you are dipping out the soup.If any are seen in the soup after it is taken up, let them be carefully removed with a spoon. To send the soup to table with bits of bone and shreds of meat in it is a slovenly, disgusting, and vulgar practice, and should be strictly forbidden, as some indifferent cooks will do so to save themselves the trouble of removing it.
A mass of shreds left at the bottom of the tureen absorbs so much of the liquid as to diminish the quantity of the soup; and if eaten, is very unwholesome, all the nourishment being boiled out of it.
Quoted from Godey's November, 1861
Rabbit Soup
- Begin this soup six hours before dinner [two hours]
- Cut up three large, but young and tender rabbits, or four small ones [scoring the backs], and dredge them with flour
- Slice six mild onions [suggest using only three] and season them with half a grated nutmeg, or more, if you like it
- Put some fresh butter into a hot frying pan, you may substitute for the butter some cold roast veal gravy that has been carefully cleared from the fat
- Place it over the fire, and when it boils, put in the rabbits and onions and fry them of a light brown
- Transfer the whole to a soup pot; season it with a very small teaspoonful of sweet marjoram leaves stripped from the stalks, and four or five blades of mace [kitchen spice works just as well for both without spoiling the flavor], adding three large carrots in slices
- Pour on, slowly, four quarts of hot water from a kettle already boiling hard
- Cover the soup pot, and let it simmer slowly, skimming it well, till the meat of the rabbits is reduced to shreds and drops from the bones, which will not be in less than five hours, if boiled as gently as it ought [two hours on a well-tended campfire is sufficient]
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