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MUTTON BONE JELLY (Invalid Cookery)
Take four shankbones of mutton, clean them thoroughly, and crack them. Put them in a pot with a quart of cold water and a little seasoning; let them simmer for eight to ten hours, then strain, and flavour with a little Bovril, or wine. This may be served warm as a soup, or cold as a jelly. A little lemon-juice improves the flavour.
A long, slow bone extraction that sets to a jelly on cooling. It is more gelatin broth than soup, and it depends entirely on keeping the liquid below a boil.
- Never let it boilA bare simmer, barely trembling, is the hinge of this recipe. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds the stock, and the jelly will set murky and greasy instead of clear.
- The bonesMutton shanks are rarely sold as such now; ask a butcher for lamb shank bones, or use the bones from four braised shanks. Cracking them exposes the marrow and the collagen-rich interior, which is where the setting power comes from — a cleaver or the butcher's saw does it.
- A quart of water for ten hoursA quart here is an imperial quart, roughly 1.1 litres, and it will not survive ten hours uncovered. Use a tight lid, the smallest pan the bones fit in, and top up with boiling water if the level falls below the bones. Expect to end with well under a pint of finished liquid.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the closest thing to what was meant: a salty beef extract paste. Half a teaspoon is plenty in this quantity. Note that the recipe already includes "a little seasoning" — salt at the end, not the beginning, or the reduction will overtake you.
- Skim twiceSkim the grey scum in the first half-hour, then chill the strained liquid and lift the set fat cap off before serving. Invalid cookery of this period was fastidious about grease, and with reason: the fat is what makes it hard to keep down.
- Whether it setsSetting is not guaranteed. Four shank bones in a quart of water usually give a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm one. If it stays liquid after a night in the fridge, reduce it further rather than adding gelatin, which flattens the flavour.
- KeepingThis is a lightly seasoned, low-acid stock and spoils quickly. Refrigerate within two hours of straining and use within three days, or freeze in small portions.
- YieldAbout one to one and a half cups of concentrated jelly — one or two invalid's servings.
"Invalid cookery" was a familiar department of large Victorian and Edwardian household manuals: a run of beef teas, barley waters, gruels, whey drinks and bone jellies intended for the sickroom, where nursing was done at home and the doctor's instruction was usually to keep up the patient's strength with something light and nourishing. The theory behind these dishes was that the goodness of meat could be extracted into a liquid the stomach need not work at, a belief that outlasted the nutritional science supporting it; gelatin, we now know, is an incomplete protein and a poor substitute for food. Bovril, the beef extract that flavours this version, was the commercial expression of the same idea and reached British kitchens in the 1880s, quickly becoming shorthand for restorative strength. What survives the theory is the technique: a slow, unboiled extraction of collagen from cracked bones is precisely how a good consomm he the cold-set jelly here is the same thing a restaurant kitchen aims for when it chills a stock to test it.