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Beef Soup (Take the cracked joints)
Take the cracked joints of beef, and after putting the meat in the pot and covering it well with water, let it come to a boil, when it should be well skimmed. Set the pot where the meat will simmer slowly until it is thoroughly done, keeping it closely covered all the time. The next day, or when cold, remove the fat which hardens on the top of the soup. Peel, wash and slice three good-sized potatoes and put them into the soup; cut up half a head of white cabbage in shreds, and add to this a pint of Shaker corn that has been soaked over night, two onions, one head of celery, and tomatoes if desired. When these are done, and they should simmer slowly, care being taken that they do not burn, strain (or not as preferred) the soup and serve. The different varieties of beef soup are formed by this method of seasoning and the different vegetables used in preparing it, after the joints have been well boiled. Besides onions, celery, cabbages, tomatoes and potatoes, many use a few carrots, turnips, beets, and force-meat balls seasoned with spice; rice or barley will give the soup consistency, and are to be preferred to flour for the purpose. Parsley, thyme and sage are the favorite herbs for seasoning, but should be used sparingly. To make force-meat balls, add to one pound chopped beef one egg, a small lump butter, a cup or less of bread-crumbs; season with salt and pepper, and moisten with the water from stewed meat; make' in balls and fry brown, or make egg-balls by boiling eggs, mashing the yolks with a silver spoon, and mixing with one raw yolk and one tea-spoon flour; season with salt and pepper, make into balls, drop in soup just before serving. - Mrs. H. B. Sherman.
A two-day stock-and-soup method typical of the 1870s kitchen, written for cooks who already knew what a joint of beef looked like. The bones do the work on day one; the vegetables go in only after the fat has been lifted.
- Cracked jointsShin, leg and knuckle bones sawn across so the marrow and gelatin can escape — ask a butcher for cut beef soup bones or oxtail. About 4 lb of bone with some meat still on it to 4-5 quarts of water gives a stock with real body.
- Cool it safelyThe instruction to leave the pot standing until the next day presumably relies on a cold pantry. Chill the stock quickly — a shallow pan, or the pot in an ice bath — and refrigerate it, then lift the hard fat off the top.
- Shaker cornDried sweet corn, cut from the cob and kiln-dried rather than lye-treated like hominy. Dried sweet corn is still sold by some regional producers; a pint dry, soaked overnight, swells to roughly a quart. Frozen corn is not a substitute for the toasty, concentrated flavour but will serve.
- Simmer, never boilThis is the hinge of the whole thing. A hard boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds the stock permanently; keep the surface barely trembling for 3 to 4 hours on day one, and skim the grey foam off in the first twenty minutes.
- Stagger the vegetablesWritten as though potatoes, cabbage, corn, onion and celery all finish together, which they do not. Soaked dried corn wants 40 minutes or more; potatoes 15 to 20; shredded cabbage 8 to 10. Tomatoes go in last.
- SeasoningNo salt is called for in the soup itself; it appears only in the force-meat and egg balls. Salt the finished soup, not the stock, or reducing the stock will overshoot. The herbs named — parsley, thyme, sage — are best tied in a bundle and pulled before serving.
- Force-meat and egg ballsThe meat balls are fried before they go in, so they hold. The egg balls are unfried and very delicate: mash the cooked yolks smooth, bind with the raw yolk and flour, roll small, and drop them into soup that is hot but off the boil, a minute before serving, or they disintegrate.
- YieldAs written, with three potatoes, half a cabbage and a pint of corn, this fills a large pot — 8 to 10 generous servings. The stock freezes well; the vegetables do not.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876 and reissued under that title in 1877 from contributions by named local women, is a book of household economy as much as cookery, and this entry shows the logic plainly: the bones are nearly free, the long simmer costs only banked heat, and the resulting stock is a blank on which any week's vegetables can be written. The closing paragraph is really a lesson rather than a recipe — carrots, turnips, beets, rice or barley, and the standing preference for grain over flour as a thickener, which was ordinary good practice before commercial roux-based soups. The "Shaker corn" is the period detail worth pausing over: the Shaker communities, several of them in Ohio and Kentucky, ran a substantial seed and dried-goods trade, and their dried sweet corn seems to have been familiar enough that a cookbook could name it without explanation.