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Leeks, Soup of, Scotch
Put the water that has boiled a leg of mutton into a stew-pot, with a quantity of chopped leeks, and pepper and salt. Simmer them an hour. Mix some oatmeal with a little cold water quite smooth, pour it into the soup, and let it simmer very gently, stirring occasionally to prevent it burning, for about fifteen minutes longer.
A thrift soup built on the broth left from boiling a leg of mutton, thickened with raw oatmeal rather than flour or butter. The whole thing hinges on the quality of that broth.
- The mutton waterThe recipe says only "the water that has boiled a leg of mutton", so what you start with depends on how that leg was cooked; expect a fatty stock, and taste it for salt. Chill it and lift the set fat off the top before you start, or the finished soup will be greasy. Lamb shoulder or shank broth stands in perfectly well; commercial lamb stock is thinner but workable.
- Quantity of leeks"A quantity" is left to the cook. For 2 quarts of broth, 6 to 8 medium leeks, white and pale green parts, chopped, gives a soup that tastes of leek rather than of stock. Split and rinse them well; grit hides in the layers.
- Which oatmealPeriod oatmeal means stone-ground meal -- pinhead, medium or fine -- rather than rolled oats. Roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons per quart of liquid. Rolled oats will work but dissolve into a slacker, cloudier body.
- Slaking the mealMixing the oatmeal smooth with cold water first is the step that matters. Tipped in dry it clumps instantly and the lumps never break down.
- SaltThe recipe adds pepper and salt with the leeks, but the mutton liquor may already be salty from the meat's cooking. Taste before adding, and hold some seasoning back for the end.
- The fifteen minutesFifteen minutes suits finely ground meal; pinhead or coarser meal wants 25 to 30 to lose its raw, chalky edge. Stir along the bottom of the pan, as oatmeal settles and scorches readily.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of broth serves four to six as a first course. A handful of chopped parsley or the shredded meat from the leg turns it into a supper dish.
Leek and oatmeal broths are long associated with Scottish cookery, and leeks cooked long in broth also lie behind better-known dishes such as cock-a-leekie. Oatmeal rather than wheat flour as a thickener is characteristic of northern British cookery, where oats grew more reliably than wheat, and it gives a soup a faintly nutty body that a roux does not. The recipe is frankly economical: it exists to use up the cooking liquor from a boiled leg of mutton, liquor that few careful households would have poured away. The instruction to stir so it does not burn suits a pot standing on a range where the heat under the base was neither even nor easily lowered.