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REFECTION |
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nutrition. Very like this, is the soup which consists of little cubes of bread toasted in butter and allowed to soak in the broth which is itself fat with butter. Soups of grated bread also belong in this class.
Pastine,* especially the glutinous pastine, which are of the same nature, are undoubtedly superior to the others for digestibility, but are accessible only to the privileged social classes.
The poor should know how much more wholesome is a broth made from remnants of stale bread, than soups of coarse spaghetti — often dry and seasoned with meat juice. Such soups are most indigestible for little children.
Excellent soups are those consisting of purees of vegetables (beans, peas, lentils). To-day one may find in the shops dried vegetables especially adapted for this sort of soups. Boiled in salt water, the vegetables are peeled, put to cool and passed through a sieve (or simply compressed, if they are already peeled). Butter is then added, and the paste is stirred slowly into the boiling water, care being taken that it dissolves and leaves no lumps.
Vegetable soups can also be seasoned with pork. Instead of broth, sugared milk may be the base of vegetable purees.
I strongly recommend for children a soup of rice boiled in broth or milk; also cornmeal broth, provided it be seasoned with abundant butter, but not with cheese. (The porridge form — polenta, really cornmeal mush, is to be highly recommended on account of the long cooking.)
The poorer classes who have no meat-broth can feed * Those very fine forms of vermicelli used in soups. |
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