Twenty Quick Soups

Rorer, S. T., 1849-1937Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.0

Word count: 15K words
Chapters: 2

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Twenty Quick Soups by S. T. RorerAuthor: Rorer, S. T., 1849-1937,Language: English, Class: TX: Technology: Home economics, Release Date: Aug 2, 2011

Editor's review

This booklet comes from the pen of S. T. Rorer, a prominent late-nineteenth-century American domestic writer. Built around the idea of speed, it collects brief recipes for twenty soups and stands as a typical early document of practical household cooking. Its value lies not in novelty but in revealing the everyday logic of a Western family kitchen a century ago: making a hot soup in a short time with limited ingredients, balancing nourishment and efficiency. The prose is plain and the steps compact; readers can cook from it or treat it as a source on food culture, observing how doneness, ingredient pairing, and quantities were phrased at the time. As a public-domain ebook, it is light and easy to obtain, suited to browsing in spare moments. Read it as a small window: one side opens onto modern demands for quick meals, the other onto the old knowledge system of domestic education. Readers interested in culinary history, home economics, or English recipe texts will find more than soup-making here.

Who it's for

A good fit for

English learners who want to practice reading with short original recipes
Readers interested in nineteenth-century Western home cooking and domestic culture
Everyday cooks who need quick, simple soups
Researchers collecting public-domain cookbooks and recipe sources

Not a good fit for

Strict cooks expecting modern nutrition ratios and precise gram weights
Those hoping for a large number of dishes or a complete soup repertoire
Readers unaccustomed to English recipe measures and old-fashioned phrasing

Reading tips

Read the table of contents and opening notes first to grasp the author's quick-soup approach, then try one recipe with easy-to-find ingredients.
Convert old-style quantities against modern measures while reading, so you don't follow them directly and end up with skewed flavors.
Copy each soup's ingredients and method onto cards as material for notes on food culture.
Readers with weaker English should start with one or two short recipes, build up common recipe verbs, and then read through.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Can the soups in this book be followed directly in today's home kitchen?

They can serve as a reference, but shouldn't be copied wholesale. The quantities and doneness descriptions carry the habits of a domestic manual from a century ago; modern readers need to convert and adjust for their own stove and taste, and a small test batch is safer.

Can I read this book if my English isn't good?

You can try. Recipe texts have short sentences and frequent verbs, making them fairly friendly English reading material; use a dictionary to learn common cooking verbs and measure words first, then read piece by piece, and the difficulty will drop noticeably.

Besides cooking, what reading value does this book have?

It preserves the phrasing and food ideas of early domestic education, offering a view of how efficiency, ingredient pairing, and quantities were understood then. It works well as a small source for the history of food culture and social life.

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About the author

Rorer, S. T., 1849-1937 Author

S. T. Rorer (1849–1937) was an American recipe writer known for practical home cooking. Public information about her life is limited, and she is chiefly known through a series of small, practical booklets. Six of her works are held here, all focused on convenient everyday dishes: sandwich combinations, many ways of cooking eggs, quick soups, made-over dishes, and oysters alongside ice creams, water ices, frozen puddings and refreshments. These titles show her attention to time-saving, economical and easy-to-follow recipes for the family kitchen. Her plain, clear instructions are typical of early practical cookbooks, offering ordinary readers workable everyday cooking solutions and reflecting the common fare of American households of her time.