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GRAVY, BROWN, SOUP (made from bones and trimmings)
Take the bones of roast meat--beef is the best--which weighed before cooking about twelve pounds. Break them up into small pieces, and put these into a saucepan, with five quarts of cold water. Bring the liquid to a boil, skim carefully, and simmer gently, but continuously, for six hours. Strain through a sieve, and leave the soup until the next day. Remove the fat from the top, leave any sediment there may be at the bottom, and pour the soup gently into a clean saucepan, with two carrots, one turnip, three onions, all sliced, a head of celery, or a salt-spoonful of pounded celery-seed, tied in muslin, a bundle of sweet herbs, and eight peppercorns. Bring it to a boil, skim it carefully, and add a dessert-spoonful of salt, which will assist the scum in rising. Draw it to the side of the fire, and simmer gently for two hours. Strain it two or three times, and, to clear it, stir into it when hot the whites of two eggs whisked thoroughly, and mixed with four tea-spoonfuls of cold water, and afterwards with a little of the soup. Beat this into the soup over the fire, and keep whisking till it boils. Skim carefully till it is quite clear. Add three table-spoonfuls of Bovril, and, if necessary, a little browning (see BROWNING), but great care must be taken with this, or the flavour of the soup will be spoilt. This is a wholesome, nourishing, and cheap soup, which costs 4d. per quart, and though it cannot be said to be quite equal to one which costs 1s. 4d., yet, if the directions are closely followed, the result will be decidedly satisfactory.
A two-day bone broth, clarified with egg white and finished with beef extract. Nothing here is unsafe; the only real obstacles are the volume and the vocabulary.
- Scale and vesselFive quarts is 20 cups, and the bones from a 12 lb roast are more than most home stockpots will hold. A 10-12 quart pot is the minimum; halving everything works without changing any of the timings.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, a salt-spoonful roughly a quarter teaspoon. The recipe adds the salt here to help the scum rise, and more seasoning arrives later with the Bovril.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the closest thing to what the book meant: a salty beef extract paste (the present-day product also contains yeast extract). Three tablespoons in five quarts is a seasoning, not a base. Add it at the end, off the boil, and taste before adding all of it.
- Overnight rest is not optionalChilling the first extraction sets the fat into a solid cap you can lift off whole, and lets the fine sediment settle. Skimming warm stock never gets it as clean, and residual fat will cloud the clarification later.
- The clarification is the hingeThe raft forms best if the egg white goes in while the soup is hot but not boiling, and if you whisk as it comes up to the boil (the recipe says to keep whisking until it boils). Once the raft sets, stop stirring and let it rise; breaking it after it forms puts albumen back into suspension and the clarity is hard to recover.
- BrowningSee the book's own entry. In manuals of this date it is usually caramelised sugar cooked dark, used for colour rather than flavour. The warning is sound: past a few drops it tastes scorched.
- Celery seed substitutionA quarter teaspoon of pounded celery seed standing in for a whole head of celery is a strong swap. Tie it in muslin as directed or you will be straining specks out for the rest of the process.
- Yield and keepingExpect appreciably less than the five quarts you started with after two long simmers and repeated straining; measure rather than assume. Refrigerate up to four days, or freeze in quart portions.
The costing at the end explains the appeal: 4d. a quart against the 1s. 4d. of the alternative the recipe names. Late-Victorian household manuals were written for kitchens where the joint was the week's centrepiece and the bones were expected to earn their keep afterwards, and the second-day stockpot was the ordinary mechanism of that thrift. The Bovril is the tell for the date. Bottled beef extract is generally traced to Liebig's product of the 1860s, with Johnston's Fluid Beef of 1874 renamed Bovril in 1886, and its arrival in a domestic recipe like this one shows how quickly bottled savour became a legitimate shortcut to the depth that once required a great deal more meat. The egg-white raft, by contrast, is much older technique, described in French and English kitchens long before this book.