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Portable Soup
Take five pounds of the shin of beef and three pounds of the knuckle of veal. Cut the meat into small pieces. Take out the marrow from the bones, and break them up. Put them with the meat into a stewpan with two gallons of cold water; bring this gradually to the boil, skim carefully, and add half a cupful of cold water two or three times to assist the scum in rising. Draw the soup to the side of the fire, and let it simmer gently but continuously for eight or ten hours. Strain through a hair sieve, and put it aside until the following day. Remove the cake of fat from the top, and pour off the soup carefully, leaving behind the settlings which are at the bottom of the pan. Put it into a saucepan with a dozen peppercorns and a tea-spoonful of salt; leave the pan uncovered, and let the liquid boil quickly until it begins to thicken. Pour it at once into a clean dry jar, place this in a saucepan over a gentle fire, and let it boil until it feels quite ropy and thick. Watch it carefully that it does not burn. Take a little out in a spoon, and if it jellies it is done enough. Pour it at once into small jelly-pots, and when it is cold turn the shapes out and put them on flannel in a warm place to dry. Keep them in tin canisters. If it is wished that the soup should be flavoured, sweet herbs, vegetables, and spices can be stewed with the meat, but usually it is more convenient that these should be omitted: the soup can then be used for any purpose. When it is wanted it is only necessary to dissolve one or two of the cakes in boiling water, and make the soup of any strength or any flavour that is required. This portable soup, which was formerly very valuable for ordinary household purposes, and also for the use of those who were obliged to take their provisions with them on long journeys, is now almost entirely superseded by Bovril and other extracts. Time, two days to make; eight or nine days to dry.
This is glace de viande under an older name: a gelatine-rich stock reduced until it sets hard. Everything up to the final reduction is standard modern practice; the drying and tin-canister storage at the end is the part to leave in 1900.
- The hinge: reduce the last stage over water, not direct heatThe hinge: take the last stage gently, not over fierce direct heat -- Once the liquid is syrupy it will scorch in seconds on a burner, and burnt glaze tastes of nothing else; the recipe's own warning to watch that it does not burn is there for this reason. Standing the jar inside a saucepan over a gentle fire amounts to a water bath, though the recipe does not actually say the outer pan holds water.
- Quantities and vesselsTwo imperial gallons is about 9 litres, so you need a stockpot of at least 12 litres for 8 lb of bone-heavy meat. A "stewpan" is simply a wide, deep saucepan; a hair sieve is a fine-mesh strainer, ideally lined with damp muslin.
- The cutsShin of beef and knuckle of veal are chosen for connective tissue, not flavour alone: the collagen is what makes the finished extract set solid. Beef shin with the bone, plus veal knuckle or split veal bones, is the equivalent order today; substituting lean muscle meat will give you a savoury liquid that never gels.
- The cold-water trickAdding half a cup of cold water two or three times as the pot comes to the boil drops the temperature briefly and lets albumen coagulate at the surface where it can be skimmed. It works, and it is worth doing, because clarity here is a matter of removing scum early rather than straining later.
- Eight to ten hours of simmeringKeep it at a bare tremble, around 85–90C, uncovered enough to escape a rolling boil. A low oven at 275–300F or a slow cooker on low holds this far more reliably than a burner and needs no watching.
- Judging "ropy"The spoon test is the real one: a teaspoonful cooled on a cold saucer should set to a firm, tacky jelly you can lift in one piece. At that point the glaze is tar-dark and clings to the spoon in a sheet.
- SaltA teaspoonful for two gallons is deliberately low, because the glaze concentrates enormously. Season the finished soup, not the extract, or the reconstituted cup will be inedible.
- Skip the drying, and refrigerate insteadCakes left on flannel in a warm room for eight or nine days are a low-acid meat product held for days at exactly the temperatures that suit spoilage organisms, and there is no way to verify from the recipe that the moisture has fallen far enough. Set the finished glaze in a covered container or ice-cube tray, keep it cold or frozen, and treat it as a perishable.
- Yield and useExpect somewhere between 400 and 700 ml of set glaze from these quantities, depending on how far you take the reduction. A rounded teaspoon dissolved in a cup of boiling water gives a light broth; a tablespoon stirred into a pan sauce gives it body no amount of butter will.
Portable soup was provisioning technology before it was a cookery-book curiosity: reduced to a hard cake, it kept without ice, weighed almost nothing, and could be cut up and dissolved a spoonful at a time. It went to sea in quantity in the eighteenth century — Cook's Pacific voyages carried it, alongside sauerkraut and malt, as part of the Admiralty's experiments against scurvy — and it travelled overland with soldiers, surveyors and emigrants under names like "pocket soup" and, when made mostly from veal knuckles, "veal glue". The recipe stands as a demonstration of what long extraction and reduction actually do to meat and bone, then admits in its closing lines that the household had moved on: Bovril and the other bottled beef extracts, commercial products of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had made two days of simmering and nine of drying look like a great deal of work. What survived was the technique rather than the cake. Restaurant kitchens kept reducing stock to a setting glaze and still call it glace de viande.