But though these soups are very good and nourishing, yet they certainly are capable of a variety of improvements.--The most obvious means of improving them is to mix with them a small quantity of salted meat, boiled, and cut into very small pieces, (the smaller the better,) and to fry the bread that is put into them in butter, or in the fat of salted pork or bacon.

The bread, by being fried, is not only rendered much harder, but being impregnated with a fat or oily substance it remains hard after it is put into the soup, the water not being able to penetrate it and soften it.

All good cooks put fried bread, cut into small square pieces, in peas-soup; but I much doubt whether they are aware of the very great importance of that practice, or that they have any just idea of the manner in which the bread improves the soup.

The best kind of meat for mixing with these soups is salted pork, or bacon, or smoked beef.

Whatever meat is used, it ought to be boiled either in clear water or in the soup; and after it is boiled, it ought to be cut into very small pieces, as small perhaps, as barley-corns.--The bread may be cut in pieces of the size of large peas, or in thin slices; and after it is fried, it may be mixed with the meat and put into the soup-dishes, and the soup poured on them when it is served out.

Another method of improving this soup is to mix it with small dumplins, or meat-balls, made of bread, flour, and smoked beef, ham, or any other kind of salted meat, or of liver cut into small pieces, or rather minced, as it is called.-- These dumplins may be boiled either in the soup or in clear water, and put into the soup when it is served out.

As the meat in these compositions is designed rather to please the palate than for any thing else, the soup being sufficiently nourishing without it, it is or much importance that it be reduced to very small pieces, in order that it be brought into contract with the organs of taste by a large surface; and that it be mixed with some hard substance, (fried bread, for instance, crumbs, or hard dumplins,) which will necessarily prolong the time employed in mastication.

When this is done, and where the meat employed has much flavour, a very small quantity of it will be found sufficient to answer the purpose required.

One ounce of bacon, or of smoked beef, and one ounce of fried bread, added to eighteen ounces of the Soup No. I. would afford an excellent meal, in which the taste of animal food would decidedly predominate.

Dried salt fish, or smoked fish, boiled and then minced, and made into dumplins with mashed potatoes, bread, and flour, and boiled again, would be very good, eaten with either of the Soup No. I. or No. II.

These soups may likewise be improved, by mixing with them various kinds of cheap roots and green vegetables, as turnips, carrots, parsnips, celery, cabbages, sour-crout, .&c; as also by seasoning them with fine herbs and black pepper.-- Onions and leeks may likewise be used with great advantage, as they not only serve to render the Food in which they enter as ingredients peculiarly savoury, but are really very wholesome.

With regard to the barley made use of in preparing these soups, though I always have used pearl barley, or rolled barley(as it is called in Germany), yet I have no doubt but common barley-meal would answer nearly as well; particularly if care were taken to boil it gently for a sufficient length of time over a slow fire before the peas are added⁷.

Till the last year, we used to cook the barley-soup and the peas-soup separate, and not to mix them till the moment when they were poured into the tubs upon the cut bread, in order to be carried into the