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Beef Brose
Take the liquor from the boiling of a large joint of beef after the meat has been removed. Make it come to the boil, and stir into it some oatmeal, which has previously been browned in an oven. Send it to table quite hot, but not too thick. A little additional liquor or stock made to boil up will remedy this. Probable cost of oatmeal, 2 1/2d. to 3d. per pound.
A one-ingredient soup that lives or dies by the broth. The only real technique is the toasting of the oatmeal and the rate at which it goes into the pot.
- The hinge: rain the meal inAdd the oatmeal in a thin stream with the liquid at a rolling boil, whisking or stirring constantly. Dumped in at once it hydrates on the outside and sets into lumps that will not disperse.
- What oatmeal means hereMedium or pinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, not rolled oats and not oat flour. Rolled oats will turn the brose to slime; fine oatmeal will thicken almost instantly and needs an even lighter hand.
- Browning the mealThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'browned in an oven'. Spread it in a dry tray in a moderate oven, around 350F, and stir every few minutes until it smells nutty and is a pale tan, roughly 10-15 minutes. This is the whole flavour of the dish, and it goes from toasted to acrid quickly.
- ProportionThe recipe gives none. Start at about 2 tablespoons of oatmeal per pint of broth, cook 10 minutes for medium meal or 20-25 for pinhead, then judge. It thickens further off the heat, so stop short of what looks right.
- The brothBeef-boiling liquor was a by-product in any kitchen that boiled a joint; today it means the strained cooking liquid from boiled brisket, shin or salt beef. Chill it and lift the set fat if it is very rich, and taste for salt before adding meal, since the oatmeal will mute the seasoning.
- ThinningFollow the instruction to add boiling stock rather than cold liquid. Cold liquid dropped into a cooked cereal makes it grainy and stops the starch behaving.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt, plenty of black pepper, and chopped parsley or the green of a leek all belong here. Two quarts of broth makes six modest bowls; it would suit a first course, with the boiled beef following.
- The price noteThe 2 1/2d. to 3d. per pound is a nineteenth-century retail figure of the kind the book appends to most entries, and is not a guide to quantity.
Brose is the Scots term for meal moistened with a hot liquid, in its plainest form nothing more than oatmeal, salt and boiling water stirred in a bowl; the distinction from porridge is that brose is steeped or briefly cooked rather than simmered long. Beef brose used the broth left from the boiling joint, and mutton, kail and neep brose worked the same way with whatever pot liquor the house had. It is offered as an object lesson in wasting nothing, the sort of economy that a household manual of the period returned to constantly. The browning of the oatmeal in the oven is the one refinement, and it is often said to have come from the same instinct that browned flour for gravies, adding colour and a toasted flavour to a dish that would otherwise taste chiefly of the pot it came from.