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Beef, Shin of, Soup
Take three or four pounds of shin of beef, cut the meat into two or three slices down to the bone, which should remain undivided and still enclosed in the flesh. Plug up each end of the bone with a stiff paste made of flour and water, to keep in the marrow. Set it on the fire in a large pot of cold water, with six or eight peppercorns and three or four cloves. Remove the scum as it rises. Season slightly with salt; otherwise, by continued boiling and warming-up, the broth will be so reduced as to become too salt. Let it boil gently for four hours, then make it boil fast, and throw in a few peeled turnips, carrots, and onions, with a small bunch of thyme and parsley. When the vegetables are tender, serve the soup only, with bits of toasted bread floating in it. When the soup has been served, take up the beef, remove the slices of meat from the bone, separate them, if needed, with a knife and fork, put them in the middle of a hot dish, and arrange the vegetables round them, cutting the carrots and turnips into shapely bits. For sauce, fry chopped onions brown, stir in amongst them a dessert-spoonful of flour, previously mixed with a little of the soup, two dessert-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, pepper and salt, stir all together, and pour it over the slices of shin, and serve. For the marrow: toast a large round of bread, lay it on a hot plate, spread the marrow roughly on it, season with pepper, salt, and a little mustard, cut it into as many pieces as there are guests, and serve very hot.
A single pot yielding three courses: broth, boiled beef with vegetables, and marrow toast. The technique is sound; only the timings and a few vessels need translating.
- The hinge: keep the boil gentleOnce the pot has been skimmed it should sit at a bare tremble, well below a rolling boil, for the four hours. A hard rolling boil emulsifies the fat and turns the broth cloudy and grey; the recipe's later instruction to "boil fast" appears to be for bringing the vegetables to tenderness quickly.
- The flour-and-water plugA stiff paste of flour and just enough water to make a putty, pressed into each cut end of the bone, keeps the marrow from melting out into the broth. Modern butchers usually saw the shin, so ask for the bone left whole and the meat cut down to it in slices. If the marrow does render out you lose the third course but not the soup.
- Shin, and what to ask forShin is the foreleg shank: gelatinous, heavily worked meat that needs long moist cooking and gives the broth its body. Hind shank or beef shank cross-cuts do the same job. The recipe gives no yield; three to four pounds bone-in across the two courses will stretch to a small household.
- Salt discipline is deliberateThe instruction to season only slightly is not timidity. The liquid reduces over four hours and again on reheating, so salt at the end, in the bowl, once the volume has settled.
- Vegetable timingTurnips, carrots and onions added whole to fast-boiling broth will take roughly 25-40 minutes depending on size. The recipe puts the thyme and parsley bundle in with them; long boiling dulls both herbs, so some cooks prefer to add the bundle nearer the end.
- Mushroom ketchupThe Victorian condiment was a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not a tomato sauce. A few bottled brands survive; otherwise substitute a mixture of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce, adding it a teaspoon at a time since both are saltier.
- Dessert-spoonfulRoughly two teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. The onion sauce is a small quantity: about two teaspoons of flour thickening a few ladles of broth.
- Skimming and the day-ahead optionChilling the strained broth overnight lifts the fat off in a solid cap and makes the skimming the recipe insists on almost effortless. The meat keeps better in the broth than out of it.
- Marrow toastThe recipe says to serve it very hot; scoop the marrow while the bone is still steaming, spread it on thick toast, season firmly, and serve at once, since it congeals unpleasantly as it cools. Take care not to let it get hot enough to run off the bread.
Shin of beef soup belongs to the great nineteenth-century tradition of frugal, whole-animal cookery. Shin was among the cheapest cuts on the block, tough with connective tissue but rich in gelatine, and the household manuals of the period returned to it constantly as proof that flavour came from time rather than money. The structure here — clear broth served first with sippets of toast, then the boiled meat and turned vegetables as a made dish with an onion and ketchup sauce, then the marrow on toast as a savoury — follows the familiar logic of the boiled-beef dinner, and marrow toast was a fashionable Victorian dish, served as a breakfast relish and also at the close of dinner. Mushroom ketchup, now largely forgotten, was then a common bottled seasoning, valued for the same dark savoury depth we would reach for soy sauce to supply.