Veal Soup
To about three pounds of a well-broken joint of veal, add four quarts water, and set it over to boil; prepare one-fourth pound macaroni by boiling it in a dish by itself with enough water to cover it; add a little butter when the macaroni is tender, strain the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper, then add the macaroni with the water in which it was boiled; onions or celery may be added for flavoring. - Mrs. R. M. Nixon, New Castle, Ind.
A plain veal broth thickened with nothing but macaroni. The recipe assumes you know how long a stock needs, since it never says; everything else is straightforward.
- The missing timeNo simmering time is given. Three pounds of cracked veal bone in four quarts of water wants three to four hours at a bare simmer to draw out the gelatin; the recipe gives no instruction about how far the liquid should reduce.
- A well-broken jointThis means a leg or shank bone sawn into pieces so the marrow and cartilage are exposed. Ask a butcher for veal shank cut crosswise, or veal neck bones; the joint cartilage is what gives the finished soup its body.
- Skim earlyVeal throws a great deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes. Skim it off before adding any vegetables, or the broth will be cloudy. The original does not mention skimming, but it does direct you to strain.
- Cook the macaroni separately, and mean itThe starch water is added back deliberately, which is the recipe's one piece of technique: it lightly binds a broth that has no roux or cream. Boil the macaroni in only enough water to cover so that water is starchy rather than dilute.
- Pasta of the periodMacaroni of this date came largely as long tubes to be broken by hand, and it was generally cooked much softer than we now like, with period directions often calling for twenty minutes or more; modern dried macaroni is done in eight to ten.
- Onion and celeryThe recipe gives neither timing nor quantity. Added in the last hour rather than at the start they can be lifted out at straining; half an onion and two ribs of celery suits four quarts.
- SeasoningSalt only after straining, as the original directs. A veal broth that has cooked down will take considerably more salt than seems right at first.
- YieldSomewhere between two and a half and four quarts depending on how hard it is allowed to cook down; six to eight as a first course.
Veal was a common base for clear soups in nineteenth-century American cookery for a practical reason: its bones are rich in gelatin and its flavor is mild, so it makes body without asserting itself. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) was assembled from contributions by named women across the Midwest, and the attribution to Mrs. R. M. Nixon of New Castle, Indiana is typical of how the book worked: a compilation rather than a single author's collection. The macaroni is a small sign of the times: dried macaroni was by then widely available in American groceries, and mid-century cookbooks treated it as a generally useful starch for soups and baked dishes rather than as a foreign ingredient. Adding back the water the macaroni cooked in, instead of discarding it, is thrift of a kind that runs through the whole book.