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Restorative Meat Jelly
Take three or four pounds of the knuckle of veal, the same weight of fresh-killed gravy beef, and one calf's foot, cut the meat from the bones, and chop these in pieces, lay them in the bottom of a stewpan, and put the meat on the top of them; then add as much cold water as will rise two or three inches above the meat; let the whole simmer very gently for four hours, taking great care to remove every particle of scum as it rises in the first boiling. Strain through a fine hair sieve, and the next morning the whole of the fat can be taken off.
A sickroom stock rather than a table soup: eight pounds of meat and a calf's foot reduced to a savoury jelly that sets firm on chilling. Most of the work is in what you do not do.
- Never let it boilThe hinge is the words simmer very gently. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine protein into the liquid, giving a cloudy, greasy jelly instead of a clear one. Keep the surface at a bare tremble for the whole four hours.
- Gravy beefA Victorian butcher's term for lean, gelatinous stewing beef from the shin or leg. Beef shin, with its connective tissue, is the direct modern equivalent; "fresh-killed" points to meat used soon after slaughter rather than kept, a distinction that matters less with modern refrigeration.
- Knuckle of veal and calf's footThe knuckle is the shank end, and the foot is there purely for gelatin. If no butcher will supply a calf's foot, veal knuckle bones or two pig's trotters give a comparable set. Without one of them the liquid will taste right but stay liquid.
- Cold water startBeginning cold and rising slowly brings the scum steadily to the surface rather than driving it back into the liquid. The recipe says to remove every particle as it rises, so skim patiently through the first boiling; anything left behind will cloud the finished jelly.
- Chilling and the fat capCool the strained liquid quickly — a shallow pan, or the pot set in cold water — then refrigerate rather than leaving it standing overnight in a warm kitchen as the original assumes. The fat lifts off the set jelly in one disc the next day.
- No salt, no aromaticsThe recipe seasons nothing, leaving the jelly neutral to be flavoured or diluted as wanted. For eating rather than nursing, salt at the end and add a leek, carrot and a few peppercorns for the last hour.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly two to three quarts of strained liquid from this quantity, setting to a firm jelly. It keeps three or four days refrigerated under its fat cap, or freeze it in portions; a spoonful dissolved in hot water is the obvious way to serve it, though the recipe says nothing about serving.
This belongs to the large nineteenth-century literature of invalid cookery. Meat jellies, beef teas and "essences" were what a household made for the sick, the convalescent and the very old, on the widely held view that concentrated animal juices were more nourishing and more easily absorbed than solid food — a belief later undercut by nutritional analysis, which found such extracts rich in flavour compounds but thin in protein. The calf's foot points to an older technique, in which a jelly drew its set from long-simmered feet, knuckles and calves' heads, though isinglass and packet gelatine were also commercially available and widely used in later nineteenth-century British cookery. The same method, reduced much further and dried, produced the portable soup that travellers and ships' cooks carried, and its descendants are the stock cubes on the modern shelf.