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Rice and Veal Broth
Put two pounds of the knuckle of veal into a saucepan, and pour over it two quarts of boiling water; add four ounces of washed rice, half a blade of mace, and a little pepper and salt, and let all simmer as gently as possible from an hour and a half to two hours. Serve the broth in a tureen with part of the meat, and send the rest of the meat to table on a separate dish, with parsley sauce over it. Time, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A plain invalid-and-nursery broth of the sort Victorian cookbooks used to stretch a cheap cut into two dishes. It works, but the seasoning and the simmer both need attention.
- The cutA veal knuckle (the shank, bone and all) is a special order from a butcher in most places now. A 2 lb slice of bone-in veal shank gives the same gelatine; bone-in pork shank or a beef shin will make a heartier broth with a different flavour.
- Keep it barely trembling"As gently as possible" is the hinge. A rolling boil clouds the broth and shreds the rice into paste; hold it at a bare shiver, with the surface only occasionally breaking, and skim the grey scum in the first ten minutes.
- Rice quantityFour ounces is a generous half cup of long-grain rice, and it will thicken two quarts noticeably as it swells. If you want a clear broth rather than a thick one, use half that and add it in the last 25 minutes.
- MaceHalf a blade of mace is roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though whole blades give a cleaner flavour and can be fished out. Nutmeg is a near substitute at half the amount.
- Conflicting timesThe body of the recipe says an hour and a half to two hours; the summary line says an hour and a half. Two hours is the better guide for shank, which needs that long before the connective tissue gives way and the meat leaves the bone.
- Season at the end"A little pepper and salt" at the start is not enough for two quarts reduced over two hours. Salt lightly at the beginning and correct the finished broth, which is where the seasoning is actually judged.
- Parsley saucePeriod parsley sauce was usually a butter-and-flour sauce, made up with milk or with some of the broth, and a good handful of chopped parsley stirred in off the heat. Make it while the meat rests so the parsley stays green.
- YieldSix to eight servings as written, but as a two-course meal for four it is more realistic: broth first, then the sliced meat under its sauce.
This belongs to a whole genre of nineteenth-century "broths" — mutton broth, chicken broth, rice and veal broth — that sat somewhere between soup, sickroom food and thrift. Veal knuckle was cheap precisely because it was mostly bone and sinew, and the gelatine it released was thought to be strengthening; broths of this kind were routinely prescribed for invalids, nursing mothers and children. The costing is the period detail worth pausing on: 2s. 4d. for a dinner for six or eight was frugal but not destitute, the arithmetic of a household that counted pennies and still expected meat on a separate dish with a sauce over it. Rice as a thickener for meat broths was long established in English kitchens by the time of this book, and was held to be gentler on a weak stomach.