Mock Bisque Soup

½ can tomatoes. 1 quart milk. 1/3 cup butter.

1 tablespoonful cornstarch.

1 teaspoonful salt.

½ saltspoonful white pepper.

Stew the tomatoes until soft enough to strain easily. Boil the milk in a double boiler. Cook one tablespoonful of the butter and the cornstarch together in a small saucepan, adding enough of the hot milk to make it pour easily. Stir it carefully into the boiling milk, and boil ten minutes. Add the remainder of the butter in small pieces, and stir till well mixed. Add salt and pepper and the strained tomatoes. If the tomatoes be very acid, add half a salt-spoonful of soda before straining. Serve very hot. Many would use more tomatoes, but it is more delicate with a small quantity.

Black Bean Soup

1 pint black beans.

2 quarts cold water.

1 small onion.

2 teaspoonfuls salt.

1 saltspoonful pepper. ¼ saltspoonful cayenne.

1 saltspoonful mustard.

1 tablespoonful flour.

2 tablespoonfuls butter.

1 lemon.

2 hard-boiled eggs.

Soak the beans over night. In the morning pour off the water, and put them on to boil in two quarts of cold water. Slice the onion and fry it in one tablespoonful of the butter. Put it with the beans. Add a bit of celery root, if you have it. Simmer four or five hours, or until the beans are soft. Add more cold water as it boils away, - about half a cup every half-hour, - to check the boiling and soften the beans, leaving about two quarts when done. Rub the beans through a strainer, put the soup on to boil again, and add the salt, pepper, and mustard. When boiling, thicken it with the flour and butter which have been cooked together. This will prevent the beans from settling. Season to taste. Cut the lemon and eggs into thin slices, put them into the tureen, and pour the hot soup over them. Serve with croutons.

Many think tomatoes are an improvement. If that flavor be desired, add to the above half a can of tomatoes, before straining. Others think it is not just right unless a quarter of a pound of salt pork, or some bones and odds and ends of meat, have been boiled with it. The beans are sometimes boiled to quite a thick pulp, and after sifting made of the proper consistency by thinning with brown soup stock, and seasoned more highly with the addition of ground herbs, spices, force-meat balls, and wine. It is then not unlike Mock Turtle Soup.

A very good bean soup may be made from the remains of baked beans. Add one quart of water and a slice of onion to each pint of beans. Boil to a pulp, mash, and season. Or make the soup of equal parts of white beans and canned or dried sweet corn. If dried corn, soak it over night, chop it fine, and boil it with the beans. If canned corn, chop it, and add it to the beans after straining. But whichever way it is prepared, do not boil the beans in the water in which they were soaked, nor serve them without straining, to remove the hulls, which contain no nutriment and are indigestible.