Mutton Soup
Boil a nice leg of mutton, and take the water for the soup, add two onions chopped fine, potato, half a cup of barley, and two large tomatoes ; season with pepper and salt, boil one hour, stir often (as barley is apt to burn), and, before taking from the fire, add one table-spoon flour wet with cold water. - Mrs. E. R. Fay, New York City.
A frugal second-day soup built on the water a leg of mutton was boiled in. The instructions assume you already had the meat cooking, so the broth is the starting point rather than something you make from scratch.
- Start with the brothA large bone-in leg simmered in water to cover will give several quarts of stock; the recipe gives no quantities, so judge by eye. If you are not cooking a whole leg, lamb shanks or neck simmered 2-3 hours give the same result; the soup wants a gelatinous, fatty broth, not a clear one.
- Skim before you seasonMutton fat sets hard and tastes strongly of the animal. Chill the broth and lift the cap off, or skim thoroughly while hot, before the vegetables go in. This is the step that decides whether the soup is good.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is older sheep, usually defined as over a year old (some definitions say two), still sold at halal and some specialty butchers but absent from most supermarkets. Lamb substitutes directly and gives a milder, sweeter soup.
- Quantities left open"Potato" and "two large tomatoes" are the whole of it. For 3 quarts of broth, figure 2-3 medium potatoes diced and about a pound of tomatoes, peeled if using fresh. Canned tomatoes work; the recipe dates from a period when winter tomatoes came from a tin.
- BarleyHalf a cup of pearl barley absorbs a great deal of liquid and will keep thickening as the soup stands. An hour is right for pearl barley; hulled barley needs closer to 90 minutes. The warning about stirring is real, since barley settles and scorches on the bottom.
- The flour finishOne tablespoon of flour slaked in cold water is a light thickener. The recipe adds it just before the pot comes off the fire; whisk it in gradually and give it two or three minutes more so the flour loses its raw taste.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a first course, four as a meal. It thickens overnight into something closer to a porridge; thin with more broth when reheating.
Boiling a joint and keeping the liquor was the ordinary economy of a nineteenth-century kitchen, where nothing that had held flavor was poured away. Mutton was the standard sheep meat of the period in both Britain and America, lamb being a luxury of spring; the strong flavor of an older animal was tempered here with tomato and thickened with barley, a grain long associated with mutton in Scotch broth and its many descendants. Compilations of this kind gathered recipes by name and city, and Mrs. Fay's New York attribution reflects how widely such editors cast their net. The gradual disappearance of mutton from American markets over the twentieth century, as sheep were raised increasingly for early slaughter, is why the recipe now reads more foreign than it did.