Home › The Principles of Cookery › Invalid's Soup
Invalid's Soup
Split a calf's foot, and cut a pound of good, lean, juicy beef and a pound of lean mutton into small pieces. Put them, together with half a gallon of water, into an earthenware jar, and bake in a slow oven from six to seven hours, adding another quart of water, a small teaspoonful of whole allspice, and a leaf or two of sage, when the mixture has been stewing three or four hours. When the soup is reduced to half the quantity, strain through a sieve, and, when cold and a jelly, remove the fat. This soup may be taken cold, or warmed up with a little vermicelli, and pepper and salt to taste. Probable cost, 2s. 1d. Sufficient for three pints.
A long, low-temperature meat extraction rather than a soup in the ordinary sense: the calf's foot supplies the gelatine that sets it, and nothing is browned or boiled hard. Cassell's measures are imperial, which matters here because the liquid quantities are large.
- Slow ovenRead this as 275-300F (135-150C). The point is a bare tremble for six or seven hours; anything hotter clouds the stock and drives off the water faster than the meat gives up its gelatine.
- Imperial liquidAn imperial gallon is 160 fl oz, so the initial half gallon is about 10 US cups and the later quart about 5 US cups. The yield of three imperial pints is roughly 7 US cups.
- The jarJars used for this sort of long bake were generally deep and covered, standing in the falling heat of a range oven, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond 'an earthenware jar'. A deep casserole or Dutch oven with a tight lid does the same job; depth matters more than material, since a wide pan evaporates too quickly to reach the stated reduction.
- Calf's footThis is the whole mechanism of the recipe and not a flavouring. If your butcher cannot split one, ask for two split veal knuckles or a section of veal shank with the joint attached. Trotters give a similar set but a distinctly porky taste.
- Salt at the endThe recipe adds pepper and salt only when the soup is served. Reducing salted stock by half would concentrate the seasoning beyond palatability.
- Allspice and sageWhole allspice berries, not ground, and only a small teaspoonful; the recipe adds them three or four hours in rather than at the start, though it gives no reason. 'A leaf or two' of sage is genuinely all that is intended; more turns medicinal.
- Skimming the fatChilling overnight and lifting the set cap off is still the cleanest method. Do it before reheating, or the fat emulsifies into the broth and the finished soup is greasy.
- Reheating and vermicelliBring the jellied stock just to a simmer and cook fine vermicelli in it for two or three minutes only, adding pepper and salt at the last moment.
- Keeping itWith no salt and no acid this is a highly perishable stock. Refrigerate and use within three days, or freeze in portions; a set jelly is not evidence of preservation.
Nearly every Victorian household manual carried a section of "invalid cookery," and Cassell's is no exception: the sickroom was managed at home, and food for the convalescent was expected to be nourishing, bland, and above all easy to swallow. The calf's foot is the giveaway. Calf's-foot jelly was the standard restorative of the period, and gelatine was widely believed to be a concentrated form of nourishment, an idea that persisted through the nineteenth century before nutritional chemistry established that gelatine is an incomplete protein. What the long bake actually produces is a clean, well-extracted double stock with a firm set, closely related to the beef teas and essences that fill the same chapters. The costing of 2s. 1d. is a reminder of who the book was written for: a manual aimed at a household keeping accounts, where a pound each of beef and mutton devoted to three pints of broth for one sick person was a real expense worth naming.