Two classes, milk soups and stock soups, will include practically all kinds that are served.

Vegetables are combined with either milk or meat stock, and often with both. Occasionally, however, fruit or vegetable pulp and juice are used for a soup without either stock or milk.

The many varieties of soup get their names from the different materials used to give flavor and substance.

Stock is the broth resulting from long, gentle cooking in water of meat, poultry, or fish. Pieces of tough muscle and bone, such as shin, neck, ox tails, and calves' heads, which would be of little value if prepared in any other way, are used for soups. The meat must be free from taint and be scraped or wiped clean. If cut in small pieces, a greater proportion of nutriment will be extracted by the water, and raw meat will yield more than that already cooked.

There should be about twice as much meat as bone. From one pint to one quart of cold water is used for each pound of meat and bone. About one-fourth pound of mixed vegetables is allowed for each pound of meat. These should be added with other seasonings after the meat has cooked for three hours. Mixed herbs and spices tied in a bit of cheese-cloth may be removed from the stock when enough flavor has been extracted. Salt may be put in at first.

Smoked or salted or very fat meat in any large quantity is undesirable, although sometimes a bit of ham or bacon is used for flavor.

The flesh of full grown animals and fowls gives more flavor and nutriment than that of younger ones, but the bones of young creatures yield a larger proportion of nutriment.

For clear soups the froth should be removed from the top of the kettle as it rises, but when nutriment is the chief end, the stock should not be skimmed.

Stock should cook slowly for four hours or more, and then be strained and cooled quickly. When a large quantity is made it should be put in quart jars and the layer of fat on top left undisturbed till the soup is used. Such stock will keep in a cool place for several days.

Stock From Left-Overs.

The raw or cooked bones and trimmings from roasts and steaks, the water in which fresh meat, poultry, rice, or any young vegetables have been cooked, and odd bits of parsley, celery, onion, and carrot may be combined to make a stock useful for sauces and hashes as well as for soups.

The cooking of such soup stock may be intermittent; to-day's remnants may be scalded and cooled, more added to-morrow, and the whole again scalded, and on the third day the cooking continued longer and the stock strained for use.

Sauces and gravies are really condensed soups, and a cupful left over may be thinned with milk or water in which meat or vegetables were boiled, even that from young turnip, cabbage, or onions may be used.

A chopped onion and grated carrot boiled in the water in which meat has been cooked, after the fat is removed, will provide an acceptable soup.

Seasoning materials like curry and celery salt, used judiciously, will make savory soups from food material often wasted.