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Ox Cheek Soup
Wash an ox cheek thoroughly in lukewarm water, then put it into a large saucepan with two ounces of lean ham, an onion stuck with twelve cloves, a turnip, two carrots, three or four sticks of celery, a tea-spoonful of pepper-corns, a blade of mace, a bunch of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, a table-spoonful of salt, a bay-leaf, and three quarts of water. Bring the liquid to a boil, remove the scum as it rises, then draw the pan to the side of the fire, and simmer gently for four hours. Take up the cheek, cut off about half a pound of the meat in slices half an inch thick, and put it back into the broth. Mix two table-spoonfuls of ground rice or plain flour with two table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup and half a table-spoonful of soy; add this to the soup, and simmer it an hour longer. Turn a large carrot and turnip into various fancy shapes, according to taste, peel and trim neatly a quarter of a pint of button-onions, cut the slices of ox cheek into inch-square pieces, and fry all these in hot butter until they are tender and lightly browned. Strain the soup, return it to the pan with the fried vegetables, etc., boil them together for ten or fifteen minutes, and serve. Time altogether, six hours. Probable cost, 1s. per quart. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
A long-simmered beef soup that still works exactly as written, provided you can get the cut. Everything hinges on the cheek: it is almost pure collagen, and it needs the full four hours to turn from rubber to silk.
- Ox cheekBeef cheek, sold by butchers as cheek meat or joue de boeuf; a single cheek is usually somewhere between one and two pounds trimmed. Ask the butcher to leave the connective tissue on: the collagen breaks down over the long simmer and gives the broth the body the recipe relies on, though the toughest silverskin will not dissolve. Two or three pounds of beef shin will substitute if cheek is unavailable, though the finished soup will be leaner.
- QuartsThese are imperial quarts of 40 fl oz, so three quarts is about 3.6 US quarts, or a little over 14 cups. Use a stockpot of at least 6 quarts to leave room for skimming.
- Soy and mushroom ketchup"Soy" here means bottled soy sauce, then a standard English store-cupboard seasoning; a dark Chinese or Japanese soy is right. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, salty, near-black mushroom extract, still made commercially and worth seeking out; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common stand-in, though sweeter and sharper.
- Cut the saltA tablespoon of salt in the initial pot, plus soy and mushroom ketchup added later, plus four hours of reduction, will overshoot badly by modern palates. Start with a teaspoon or two and season at the end, once the soup has been strained and the liquid volume is settled.
- "Draw the pan to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant moving off direct heat to hold a bare tremble. On a modern hob it is the lowest setting with the lid ajar. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth.
- Skim twiceThe recipe tells you to skim scum at the start; it does not mention the fat. Cheek is fatty, and the soup is much better if chilled after straining so the fat lifts off in a cake, then reheated with the fried garnish.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of ground rice or flour into roughly three quarts is a light body, not a sauce. Slake it in the mushroom ketchup and soy to a smooth paste before it goes in, or it will lump.
- "Turning" and the garnishTurning means paring carrot and turnip into small barrel or olive shapes with a knife, mostly for looks; even 3/4-inch dice is fine. A quarter of a pint of button onions is a volume measure, roughly 5 fl oz in the cup, so about 3-4 oz of peeled pearl onions. Fry the vegetables and the diced meat separately from each other so the browning is even.
- YieldTen to twelve as a first course, or six as a main with bread. It improves overnight and freezes well before the garnish is added.
Ox cheek soup belongs to the Victorian tradition of making a substantial dish from the parts of the animal nobody wanted whole, and the recipe's stated probable cost per quart reflects a format in which cost and sufficiency were printed for every recipe as a matter of house style. The head was the cheapest beef on the board, and Victorian cookery writers are often said to have pressed the cheek as proof that flavour and gelatine came from the neglected cuts rather than the expensive ones. The seasoning is a fair snapshot of a late-nineteenth-century English kitchen shelf: mace and cloves left over from the older, heavily spiced cookery, mushroom ketchup and soy standing in for the deep savoury note that a modern cook would reach for a stock cube or a splash of fish sauce to supply. Soy sauce had reached Britain through the Dutch and English East India trades and by this date was ordinary grocer's stock, sold alongside the ketchups. The fancy-turned carrots and neat button onions are the one flourish, a hint of French garnishing applied to a soup made from an ox's face.