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Soup, Without Stock
Cut a good-sized cabbage, put it in a stewpan with some carrots, onions, celery, and the broken bone of a leg of mutton or rib of beef from which all the meat has been taken. Add a quart of water, and let all simmer together for five hours. Then strain the soup, and take off any fat which may still float on it. Pick out the best pieces of cabbage, put them into the soup, season with pepper and salt, make quite hot, and serve.
A frugal Victorian bone-and-vegetable broth built on the assumption that no household throws away a joint bone. The one thing to watch is the liquid: a quart of water over five hours will largely disappear unless the pot is tightly covered.
- What "without stock" meansIn Victorian cookery books stock is a prepared meat broth kept in the larder, and many soups begin with it. This recipe makes its own thin stock in a single pot from a picked-over bone.
- StewpanA heavy, straight-sided saucepan with a close-fitting lid. Any 3-4 quart heavy pot serves; the lid matters more than the metal, since five hours uncovered will reduce a quart to nearly nothing.
- Keep the water upSimmer at the barest tremble and check every hour, topping up with hot water to keep the bone and vegetables submerged. A rolling boil will emulsify the fat into the broth and leave it cloudy and greasy.
- The cabbage will not surviveFive hours reduces cabbage to grey threads and a sulphurous edge. The instruction to "pick out the best pieces" is optimistic; one option is to hold back a quarter of the cabbage, shred it, and simmer it in the strained broth for five minutes before serving.
- Season at the end, as writtenA bare bone contributes little salt but the broth reduces considerably, so the recipe is right to leave pepper and salt until after straining. Taste once the liquid is at its final volume.
- DegreasingSkimming hot fat off the surface is imprecise. Chilling the strained broth for a few hours sets the fat into a disc that lifts off whole, which is cleaner and costs nothing but time.
- Getting flavour from a bare boneA picked mutton or beef bone gives gelatine and body but not much taste. Browning the bone and the onion hard before the water goes in makes the difference between a thin vegetable water and something worth eating; the bone may have come from a roast and been browned already.
- YieldA quart of water, reduced, gives two modest servings. Scale up in proportion if you want it to feed a table, and expect a light broth rather than a thick soup.
The title is the point: nineteenth-century English cookery was organised around stock, the pot of meat broth that a well-run kitchen kept going and drew on for sauces, gravies and soups alike. Households without a cook, a stockpot or a daily joint needed an answer, and this is the barest form of it: the bone that has already given up its meat, the vegetables at hand, and time. The instruction that all the meat has been taken off is not incidental but the whole premise, and the five-hour simmer suited a constantly warm range, where a pot at the back of the stove could be kept going. Cabbage soups of this kind were common across working households in Britain and northern Europe, generally with whatever root vegetables were cheapest that week.