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Rice Stew Soup
Take four pounds of good ox-cheek. Wash and soak it for twelve hours in cold water, then dry it well, put it into a stewpan with three quarts of water, four onions, a bunch of herbs, a sliced carrot, two or three sticks of celery, and a seasoning of salt, pepper, and cayenne. Simmer the meat gently for two hours, then take it out, cut it into pieces convenient for serving, and return it to the saucepan with six ounces of well-washed rice. Simmer all together till the rice is tender. If liked, this soup may be thickened with a little curry-powder, or with a little brown thickening, and cow-heels may be used instead of ox-cheek in its preparation. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A Victorian household soup built on a cheap, heavily worked cut. The instructions are sound, but the timings assume a cut most modern cooks handle differently, and one line in the method will thicken the pot into porridge if followed literally.
- The hinge: cook the cheek longer than two hoursOx cheek is dense connective tissue and is unlikely to be tender at two hours of simmering alone; three to four hours of bare simmering, or about an hour in a pressure cooker, is closer to the mark. Take the meat out when it yields to a fork, not when the clock says so, then proceed with the rice.
- Ox cheek todayBeef cheek can usually be had from a butcher, though it is worth ordering ahead. Four pounds is roughly two to four whole cheeks; trim the silverskin and the hard fat before soaking.
- Imperial quartsThree imperial quarts is about 3.4 litres, roughly 3.6 US quarts. Expect to top up during the long simmer, since the recipe gives no lid instruction.
- Rice quantity and timingSix ounces of rice in three quarts of stock will keep swelling and will turn the soup to a thick pottage on standing. Add it for the last 20 minutes only, or cook it separately and combine at the table if you want leftovers that still pour.
- The twelve-hour soakSoaking in cold water was done to draw out blood and slaughterhouse residue from a cut sold very fresh. It does no harm but is largely unnecessary now; refrigerate if you do it, and blanch and skim instead if you are short of time.
- Skim the fatCheek renders a great deal of fat and the recipe never mentions removing it. Chill the strained broth and lift the solid cap, or skim repeatedly during the simmer; otherwise the rice sits in grease.
- Brown thickeningThis means a roux of flour browned in dripping or butter, whisked into a little hot broth before going into the pot. About 1 oz each of fat and flour is enough for this volume, and it is barely needed once the rice has released its starch.
- Seasoning and cost"A bunch of herbs" is a bouquet garni of parsley stalks, thyme and bay. The curry powder variant reflects the Anglo-Indian taste of the period and wants a full tablespoon, bloomed in fat, not a pinch. The 3s. is late-Victorian money and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
- YieldSeven or eight portions as written, and it is a meal in a bowl rather than a first course. It reheats well, thinned with stock or water.
Ox cheek and cow heel were among the cheapest offerings on a Victorian butcher's slab, bought by households that needed to feed many people from little money and had a range or hob that could be left ticking over all afternoon. Cuts of this kind recur in the late nineteenth-century cookery compendia precisely because they reward long, unattended cooking and yield both meat and a gelatinous broth from a single pot. The suggestion to swap in cow heel is not a flourish but a straight economy: heels are almost pure collagen and set the liquid to a jelly when cold, which is why they turn up so often in soups and in the brawns of the same period. The optional curry powder is of a piece with the period, curry having settled into British domestic cookery as a seasoning bought ready-mixed by the tin rather than as a cuisine.