Season and fry some lamb chops; add 2 green peppers sliced thin, 1 onion chopped and an herb bouquet. Then cook ½ cup of barley in 1 quart of soup stock until tender. Pour all together and let cook until meat is very tender. Serve hot.
April 5 — No. 5
Turkish
A one-line stew disguised as a soup: browned lamb chops finished in barley broth. The original assumes you know how long each stage takes, so the timings below are the useful part.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no weight of lamb, only "some lamb chops," so scale to taste; about 1½ lb of shoulder or neck chops would serve four (loin dries out). The half cup of barley will swell to several times its volume, so expect a thick soup rather than a clear one.
- The hinge: don't rush the lambFrying is only for colour. The chops need 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering in the barley broth before the meat pulls easily from the bone. Bone-in chops are what give the finished soup body.
- Barley timingPearl barley takes 40-50 minutes in stock; hulled barley closer to 90. Cook it in the quart of stock as directed rather than in water, since the starch it releases is the thickening.
- Liquid levelOne quart of stock will be largely absorbed by the barley and reduced by the long simmer. Keep another cup or two of stock hot and top up, or you will end with a pilaf.
- Herb bouquetA period bouquet garni means parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or in a scrap of muslin. Tie it so it can be fished out before serving.
- Green peppersIn American usage of this period "green pepper" generally means a sweet bell pepper, not a chile. If you want heat, add a pinch of dried red pepper separately.
- FinishingSkim the fat that rises from the lamb before serving, and correct the salt at the end — barley absorbs a surprising amount of it. Lemon juice or a spoonful of yogurt stirred in off the heat brings it closer to the Turkish soups it borrows its name from.
The "of all nations" framing of this book — a phrase often used of such collections — is more aspirational than ethnographic: a daily calendar of dishes for American households, with foreign names attached to whatever combination of ingredients seemed suggestive of the place. Lamb, barley and peppers are a fair sketch of an Anatolian kitchen, and barley soups thickened with grain are genuinely old across the eastern Mediterranean, though a Turkish cook might well have reached instead for bulgur or rice and finished the pot with lemon, yogurt or a spoonful of butter reddened with pepper. What the entry seems to document is something like a taste for cosmopolitan menus in domestic cookery — the same impulse that put "à la Bordelaise" on the previous day's page — served through the reassuring medium of a chop and a quart of stock.