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MUTTON BROTH
Put two pounds of mutton and two quarts cold water to boil, add one table-spoon rice washed carefully through several waters. Let it boil till the meat will leave the bone, and the rice is cooked to a liquid mass. Take from the fire, season with a little salt; skin, if preferred. If for a patient with flux leave on all the fat (the more fat the better). This is also a nice way to make chicken broth. Take a chicken size of a quail and prepare as above.
A plain invalid broth from the sickroom chapter, and it works as written if you allow for the long simmer the original assumes but never states. Two points need translating: the cut of mutton and the medical advice attached to the fat.
- The meatMutton means sheep over a year old, still sold at halal and some specialty butchers; lamb shoulder or neck is the usual substitute and gives a milder broth. Use a bone-in cut — the recipe's test for doneness is that the meat leaves the bone, so a boneless piece removes the only timing cue given.
- TimingTwo pounds of bone-in shoulder or neck at a bare simmer needs roughly 2 to 2.5 hours to reach that stage. Keep it at a lazy bubble; a hard boil will emulsify the fat and cloud the broth without making the meat any more tender.
- The riceOne tablespoon of rice in two quarts is a very light thickening, and "cooked to a liquid mass" means it should collapse entirely. Long-grain will hold its shape too well; short-grain or ordinary white rice breaks down better over a long simmer. The repeated washing would have removed milling dust and loose starch, and is still worth doing.
- "Skin, if preferred"Almost certainly a misprint for skim: lift the grey scum in the first twenty minutes, then the fat. The easiest method is to cool the finished broth and lift the solidified cap off the top the next day.
- Flux and the fat"Flux" was the period term for dysentery or severe diarrhoea. The instruction to leave every scrap of fat on for such a patient reflects nineteenth-century sickroom theory, not current medical practice, and should be read as a historical curiosity rather than followed.
- "A chicken size of a quail"A very young, very small spring bird; the phrase indicates something far lighter than a modern roasting chicken. The nearest thing on sale is a poussin, or use about a pound of chicken thighs and wings; chicken needs only about an hour, not the mutton's two-plus.
- Yield and seasoningTwo quarts of water will reduce over the long simmer, leaving something in the region of four to six servings, though the recipe states no yield. The "little salt" is deliberate -- invalid cookery was seasoned faintly -- so salt to taste at the end if you are serving it as ordinary soup, and a strip of lemon peel or a few parsley stems will lift it considerably.
Buckeye Cookery includes a section of cookery for the sick, and broths like this one sat at the centre of it. Before antibiotics and intravenous fluids, nursing a fever or a bowel complaint largely meant keeping the patient fed with something warm, liquid and easy to swallow, and mutton broth thickened with a spoonful of rice was a common answer in English-language household and nursing manuals of the period. The detail that gives the page its date is the word flux, an old catch-all for dysentery and bloody diarrhoea, and the confident direction to load such a patient with fat; the reasoning of the time held that wasting illnesses had to be countered with rich, strengthening food. Mutton was far more prominent on the nineteenth-century American table than it is now, and its near-disappearance from US butchers over the following century is why a recipe this simple now needs a substitution note at all.