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VEAL SOUP (a German recipe)
Should the breast of veal be chosen, allow one pound to every quart of water; in the case of knuckle of veal, allow two pounds to the quart. Let the water come slowly to the simmering point, add salt, and skim well; continue simmering for at least two hours. Add rice, sago, or klosse to give the soup substance. Ten minutes before sending to table, add, in small pieces, cauliflower, scorzonera, or asparagus, previously cooked. Finely-minced chives may be thrown in the last thing, or an onion may be boiled in the soup, and taken out before the other vegetable is added.
A plain German-style broth built on the gelatine of veal bones rather than on browning or aromatics. The whole character depends on holding it below a boil.
- Never let it boilVeal breast and knuckle throw a great deal of scum and fine albumen; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth beyond recovery. Keep it at a bare shiver, with the surface barely trembling, for the full two hours and skim whenever a grey foam gathers.
- The meat-to-water ratiosOne pound of breast per quart, two pounds of knuckle per quart. The knuckle needs more because so much of its weight is bone, though that same bone gives the body and slight stickiness this soup is after.
- KlosseGerman dumplings — flour, semolina, breadcrumb or marrow, depending on the region — poached in the soup or in separate salted water. Any small dumpling serves; matzo balls or semolina gnocchi are the nearest common equivalents. Rice and sago are the plainer alternatives the recipe offers.
- SagoPalm-starch pearls, still sold in South Asian and Caribbean groceries. Tapioca pearls behave the same way. The recipe gives no quantity or timing; the pearls need a good while in the simmering soup and thicken more than they look as though they will.
- ScorzoneraBlack salsify, a long dark-skinned root with a faint oyster flavour. It is rare in supermarkets but common in European markets in autumn and winter. Salsify or young parsnip stands in acceptably.
- Why the vegetables go in cookedCauliflower boiled from raw in the pot would shed sulphurous flavours into a broth that has been kept clear for two hours. Cook the vegetables separately, cut them small, and give them ten minutes in the soup only to warm through.
- SeasoningSalt goes in early, at the skimming stage, as the recipe directs; taste again at the end. The onion is boiled in the soup and lifted out before the other vegetable goes in.
Cassell's heading simply calls this a German recipe, which sets it apart from the heavily garnished English and French veal soups of the same period, some of which were thickened with egg yolk and cream or fortified with forcemeat balls. What makes it German is the *Kloss* — the dumpling family that runs from Bavarian semolina *Grießklößchen* to the large potato dumplings of Thuringia — and the reliance on plain veal broth, *Kalbsbrühe*, as an everyday base rather than a special-occasion consommé. Veal knuckle is often said to have been a common soup meat in Central Europe precisely because it was cheap and mostly bone: the gelatine it releases gives a light broth substance without fat. Scorzonera, listed here alongside cauliflower and asparagus as if equally familiar, was a common kitchen-garden root in nineteenth-century Britain and Germany and has since largely dropped out of English-speaking cooking while remaining ordinary in Belgian, Dutch and German markets.