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Beef Soup (Take bones and trimmings)
Take bones and trimmings from a sirloin steak, put over fire after breakfast in three quarts water, boil steadily until about an hour before dinner, when add two onions, one carrot, three commor-sized potatoes, all sliced, some parsley cut fine, a red pepper, and salt to taste. This makes a delicious soup, sufficient for three persons. All soups are more palatable seasoned with onions and red pepper, using the seeds of the latter with care, as they are very strong.
A frugal household stock built from the bones and scraps of a steak, cooked most of the morning and finished with vegetables. The proportions are loose by design, but a few things need translating.
- The timing in plain terms"After breakfast until an hour before dinner" in a nineteenth-century house means roughly four to six hours of simmering, with dinner served at midday or early afternoon. Three to four hours at a bare simmer will extract everything the bones have to give.
- Boil steadily means simmerA hard rolling boil emulsifies fat into the broth and turns it cloudy and greasy. Keep it at a lazy bubble, skim the grey foam off in the first twenty minutes, and skim fat from the surface before the vegetables go in.
- Red pepperThis is a dried hot pod, not a sweet bell pepper. One small dried chile is plenty for three quarts; the closing note about the seeds is the recipe's real warning, since the heat is concentrated in the placental tissue the seeds sit against.
- Vegetables go in late for a reasonAn hour is right for sliced carrot and potato in a soup meant to be eaten in pieces. If you want the potato to hold its shape rather than thicken the broth, cut it thick and give it thirty to forty minutes.
- ParsleyAdd half the parsley with the vegetables and the rest off the heat. Long cooking flattens it to hay.
- Salt at the endThree quarts reduce considerably over several hours. Salting early gives an unpleasantly sharp soup by the time it reaches the table.
- YieldThe book says three persons, which assumes soup as one course of several. After several hours of simmering and skimming, expect appreciably less liquid than the three quarts you started with.
- If you have no steak bonesTwo to three pounds of beef shin, oxtail or marrow bones will do the same work and give more body. Browning them in the oven at 425F first is not in the original and will change the character, but it deepens the broth.
This is domestic economy in recipe form: the sirloin was the expensive purchase, and the soup is what the household extracted from what would otherwise be thrown out. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio and usually dated to editions appearing from 1877, was assembled from contributions by Midwestern housewives and repeatedly reprinted. The closing generalisation about onions and red pepper is characteristic of the book, which slips advice into the middle of instructions as though the writer were talking over the reader's shoulder. Note too that dinner here is the midday meal, the older usage still common in rural American households at the time.