r.

For the purpose of colouring clear soups, however, there is nothing in the
world to compare with what French cooks call _caramel_. Caramel is really
burnt sugar. There is a considerable art in preparing it, as it is
necessary that it should impart colour, and colour _only_. When prepared
in the rough-and-ready manner of burning sugar in a spoon, as is too often
practised in English kitchens, this desideratum is never attained, as you
are bound to impart sweetness in addition to a burnt flavour. The simplest
and by far the most economical method of using caramel is to buy it
ready-made. It is sold by all grocers under the name of Parisian Essence.
A small bottle, costing about eightpence, will last a year, and saves an
infinite loss of time, trouble, and temper.

By far the most economical soups are the thick, where all the ingredients
can be rubbed through a wire sieve. Thick soups can be divided into two
classes--ordinary brown soup, and white soup. The ordinary brown is the
most economical, as in white soups milk is essential, and if the soup is
wished to be very good it is necessary to add a little cream.

Soups owe their thickness to two processes. We can thicken the soup by
adding flour of various kinds, such as ordinary flour, corn-flour, &c., and
soup can also be thickened by having some of the ingredients of which it is
composed rubbed through a sieve. This class of soups may be called Purees.
For instance, Palestine soup is really a puree of Jerusalem artichokes;
ordinary pea soup is a puree of split peas. In making our ordinary
vegetarian soups of all kinds, as a rule, all the ingredients should be
rubbed through a sieve. The economy of this is obvious on the face of it.
In the case of thickening soup by means of some kinds of flour, for
richness and flavour there is nothing to equal ordinary flour that has been
cooked. This is what Frenchmen call roux.

As white and brown roux are the very backbone of vegetarian cookery a few
words of explanation may not be out of p