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Spanish Soup
Take a piece of the shin of beef weighing about four pounds, and one pound of the knuckle of ham. Break the bones into small pieces with a cleaver, and tie the meat with string to keep it in shape. Put both into a large pot, and pour over them a gallon of cold water. Bring the liquor gently to the point of boiling, remove the scum carefully, and, before it fully boils, throw half a tea-spoonful of cold water into it once or twice, to assist the scum in rising. Add a little pepper, draw the pan to the side of the fire, and let its contents simmer gently and steadily for two hours and a half. Blanch a table-spoonful of rice, throw it into the soup, and boil it an hour longer. Half an hour before the soup is to be served, put into it a pint of Brussels sprouts and an onion thinly sliced. If preferred, other vegetables may be added to or substituted for the sprouts. They must be blanched and stewed in the soup long enough to cook them, and no longer. Remove the bones from the soup, take up the meat, put it on a dish, garnish with the sprouts, and serve very hot. Send the soup to table in a tureen. If the ham has not made the broth sufficiently salt, a little more salt should be added. Time, three hours and a half from the time the water boils. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A long-simmered beef and ham broth served in two parts: the clear soup in a tureen, the meat and vegetables as a second dish. Most of what needs translating is equipment and salt management.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it below a rolling boil -- The whole point of the cold-water start, the careful skimming and the pan drawn to the side of the fire is a clear broth. Once it boils hard the fat and albumen emulsify and the liquid goes cloudy for good. Keep it at a bare tremble for the full two and a half hours; the recipe's later 'boil it an hour longer' should be read as the same gentle simmer it has just prescribed.
- The splash of cold waterThe recipe throws in half a teaspoon of cold water to 'assist the scum in rising'. The traditional explanation is that it checks the rise and lets the coagulated scum firm up and float rather than break apart, though half a teaspoon in a gallon can hardly shift the temperature; careful skimming with a ladle achieves the same end.
- Shin and ham knuckleShin (US: beef shank, bone in) is still sold and is the right cut for its gelatine. Period ham knuckles were generally salt-cured and are likely to be saltier than a modern supermarket hock, which fits the recipe's holding back of salt until the end. Taste before you add any.
- Breaking the bonesIgnore the cleaver instruction and ask the butcher to saw the shank into 1-2 inch rounds. Marrow and gelatine extract far better from cut faces, and a cleaver on beef bone in a domestic kitchen is a poor bargain.
- Blanching the riceBlanching here means a brief boil in plain water, then draining, to wash off surface starch so the broth stays clear. A tablespoon of long-grain rice in a gallon of stock is a garnish, not a thickener; an hour of simmering will leave it very soft.
- Brussels sprouts and timingA pint of sprouts is roughly 10-12 oz. Blanch them separately for three or four minutes, then give them only long enough in the soup to finish -- eight to ten minutes for small ones. The recipe's own warning, "long enough to cook them, and no longer," is the operative rule.
- Quantities and yieldA gallon here is the Imperial gallon, about 4.5 litres or 19 US cups; expect noticeable loss to evaporation over three and a half hours. Serves seven or eight as written, counting the boiled beef as a second course.
- Cost4s. 6d. is a late-Victorian shilling price and suggests a dish that was middling rather than cheap; the recipe itemises nothing, so the split between the beef and the ham is guesswork.
The name is not describing anything Spanish in the sense a Spanish cook would recognise; it may gesture at the general shape of a cocido or olla podrida, the Iberian pot of meat, ham bone, chickpeas and vegetables in which the broth is drunk first and the meat eaten after. That two-service structure is present here -- soup to table in a tureen, meat on a dish garnished with the vegetables -- though the resemblance is suggestive rather than proof of borrowing, and the chickpeas are replaced by a spoonful of rice and the greens by Brussels sprouts. Whatever its title, the method is a lesson in clear broth: cold water start, gentle rise, patient skimming, no hard boil -- the sequence on which consomm he other clear soups depend.