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Pork Soup, or Jelly
Cut up and break the bone of a leg of pork; simmer it gently in three gallons of water till the liquid is reduced to one. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste, and strain it. This may either be taken as soup, or eaten cold as jelly, and is very nourishing.
A single-ingredient stock built on a whole leg of pork, reduced by two-thirds so it sets firm when cold. The instructions are sparse; almost everything depends on the reduction and the skimming.
- Scale it downThree gallons of water and a whole leg of pork will overwhelm most domestic pans. A 3-4 lb piece of leg or hock, sawn into sections, with 4-5 quarts of water reduced to about 1 1/2 quarts keeps the original's three-to-one reduction in an 8-quart stockpot.
- Ask the butcher to saw the bone"Break the bone" means exposing the marrow and increasing the cut surface of the joint, which is where the gelatine comes from. A saw does this cleanly; a cleaver at home tends to shatter it into splinters that end up in the pot.
- Barely a simmerThe hinge of the recipe is the word "gently." A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the liquid and gives a cloudy stock that will never set clear. Hold it at 180-190F, with the surface just shivering, for four to six hours.
- Skim, then skim againRemove the grey scum in the first twenty minutes, and expect a thick fat cap. Chilling the strained stock overnight lets you lift the fat off in a single disc, which matters more here than in a soup you intend to eat hot.
- Season after reducing, not beforeThe original adds salt, pepper and nutmeg at the end for good reason: salt added at the start concentrates threefold as the liquid falls. Taste when you are down to your final volume, and remember that a jelly eaten cold needs noticeably more seasoning than the same stock drunk hot.
- Whether it will setLeg and hock are rich in connective tissue, so a properly reduced stock should set to a sliceable jelly with no added gelatine. If it is only loose after a night in the refrigerator, reduce it further rather than adding anything.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, which is six to eight servings as soup or a 1 1/2-quart mould of jelly. Refrigerate up to four days, or freeze; leaving the fat cap in place will extend it a little.
This is really a lesson in extraction: what a bone and water will yield if left alone long enough. The dual identity of soup and jelly was standard in nineteenth-century domestic writing, where a strong meat stock that set firm when cold was regarded as invalid food, easy to swallow and, in the language of the day, "nourishing" -- gelatine was widely believed to be restorative in itself, a view later nutrition did not support. Pork appears here rather than the veal knuckle of the fashionable cook because a leg of pork was cheap; the same principle produced the calf's-foot jelly of richer kitchens and the commercial meat extracts that were beginning to displace both by the time this dictionary appeared.