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SUPERLATIVE SOUP (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
Take four pounds of the shin of beef, and cut it into six pieces. Fry a large onion, cut small, in dripping, add the pieces of meat, and shake the pan to keep them from burning. Dredge upon them gradually six ounces of flour, and stir all well together for five minutes. Pour in gradually three quarts of boiling water. Let the liquor boil, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Add salt and pepper and a tea-spoonful of ground allspice. Draw the pan to the side, and simmer its contents gently for three hours and a half. Take the meat out, and serve it on a dish separately, with dressed vegetables. Serve the soup in a tureen. Time, three hours and a half to simmer the liquor.
A one-pot dinner disguised as a soup: the shin gives you both a thickened broth and a separate meat course. The only real skill is holding the pot at a bare simmer for three and a half hours.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: boil only long enough to skim -- the recipe brings the liquor to the boil to throw up its scum, then has you draw the pan to the side and hold it at the barest tremble for the rest of the time. A sustained rolling boil will emulsify the fat into the thickened liquid and tends to leave shin meat stringy rather than gelatinous.
- Shin of beefAsk for beef shank, bone in if possible, cut into thick sections; the recipe wants six pieces out of four pounds, so three or four cross-cut shanks depending on size. The collagen is the whole point, so mixed packs sold as "stewing beef" are a poorer substitute.
- Three quartsIn imperial measure about 3.4 litres; if you read it as US quarts, about 2.8 litres or 12 cups. Some liquid will go off over three and a half hours of gentle simmering, though the recipe says nothing about the finished volume.
- DrippingRendered beef fat. Any neutral oil or clarified butter works; use about 2 tablespoons, enough to soften the onion and brown the meat.
- Six ounces of flourRoughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups. Dredged onto the meat and cooked five minutes, it makes a rough roux and gives a distinctly thick, old-fashioned soup. Halve it if you want something closer to a modern broth.
- Boiling water, graduallyThe instruction is deliberate. Add the water a ladleful at a time, stirring, or the flour clinging to the meat will seize into lumps that never smooth out.
- AllspiceA teaspoon of ground allspice in three quarts is assertive but characteristic of early nineteenth-century English soups. Whole berries in a muslin bag, fished out at the end, give a cleaner result.
- SkimmingSkim in the first ten minutes, before the liquid thickens further; once the flour has set, scum and fat are much harder to lift off. Chilling the soup overnight and lifting the fat cap is easier still.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight as two courses: soup from the tureen first, then the shin meat with boiled or buttered root vegetables. "Dressed vegetables" here simply means plainly cooked and buttered, not salad.
Dr. William Kitchiner (died 1827) held a medical degree but lived in London on an inherited fortune rather than in practice; his Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, was among the earliest English cookery books to insist on weighed quantities and timed cooking rather than handfuls and guesswork. His recipes circulated so widely under his name that later compilations reprinted them with the attribution intact, which is why this one still carries it decades after his death. The dish itself is thrift dressed as generosity: shin is one of the cheapest cuts on the animal, and by browning it with onion and flour the cook gets a thick, filling soup and a dish of boiled meat from a single pot and a single fire.