An essay upon this subject lately published asserts that " Nothing is easier than to make good soups.'' The reader who has sat at many tables in town and country is driven to the necessity of questioning the truth of the statement or to the conviction that the Average American Cook is the stupidest of scholars. So general is the impression that soup-making is an intricate business, and, as our A.A.C., just alluded to, would put it - "a mussy and fussy piece of work" that, when done, does not pay for the time and labor expended, that the everyday family dinner of the great middle class does not as a rule include this dish. Our men and boys are disposed to despise, or be impatient of, it, being in a hurry to fall to work upon the weightier matters of the meal. Each of them could dispose of his pound of meat with potato accompaniment in the time consumed in swallowing a dozen mouthfuls of that which a representative man of the people complained openly, " did not stick to his ribs."

There may be a reason for this popular prejudice more worthy of respect than silly contempt for new-fangled ways and foreign fads would be. It can be stated in a single sentence :

The Average American Cook has never mastered this, according to our essayist, easiest of culinary arts. When custom or convention, or invalidism, dictate "soup for dinner," our A.A.C. buys a bone and "some'' soup-meat; puts them over the fire with "some" water, cooks all together for "some" time, and serves it up in "some" fashion. If her dishes are washed with a like disregard of common sense and comfort, there is little choice between her soup and her dish-water. Both are dingy, greasy, unpalatable, and indigestible. It is well for the household to which she ministers that this article of food appears but rarely at the head of her board.

Yet the making of soup in the right way is one of the simplest of kitchen duties. Once in the pot, and set at the side of the range, the prospective savoriness takes care of itself for hours, and is the better for being left alone. When removed from the fire, turned into an earthenware vessel, and seasoned, it requires another period of wholesome neglect that the fat may arise and form into a solid cake. Take this off, and, should you find - as is probable and desirable - a firm jelly below, warm the soup until it will flow freely through a fine soup-sieve and strain out meat, bones, and vegetables. You have now so many pints, or quarts, of "stock," the strength of which depends upon the raw material that went into the kettle, and slow cooking. As the end to be gained is the extraction of every particle of nourishment from the meat, etc., the soup should never boil fast. This is a rule without exception. Soup-making is a process that cannot be hurried. Therefore, keep a long look ahead upon the stock-pot, which should never be of metal. The hireling's practice of letting soup get cold in the kettle in which it was cooked is unclean and unwholesome.

Upon this stock there may be founded an endless variety of gravy soups, clear soups, and, what some judges of really good living rate as most useful and relishful of all - the great and respectable family of broths, purees, and cream soups. In the manufacture of these, the ingenious housewife finds scope for many inventions. The laws governing clear soups have a certain conservative rigor becoming the rank they take in the family bill-of-fare. They must be made of fresh, raw meat, and, when twice strained, require to be also clarified, and if too pale, must be artificially colored. Compared with them the broths are Bohemian, a hearty, happy-go-lucky tribe, adapting themselves easily to divers and incongruous constituent elements and thickening up in a jolly, democratic spirit which commends them to children and homely folk.