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Veal Soup
Take two pounds of the knuckle of veal. Divide it into three or four pieces, and put these into a stewpan with any bones or trimmings of veal or poultry that may be at hand, and add a quarter of a pound of lean ham, a few outer sticks of celery, an onion with a clove stuck into it, a small blade of mace, six or eight peppercorns, a little salt, and two table-spoonfuls of rice. Pour over these ingredients about five pints of cold stock or water, and let the soup simmer gently from three to four hours. Carefully remove the scum as it rises. Strain the stock, season and flavour as much of it as may be required for table with salt, white pepper, lemon-juice, and pounded mace, and thicken with white thickening. If preferred, this soup may be served with the boiled rice in it, and with sippets or forcemeat balls. The veal may be cut into neat pieces, and served with parsley and butter or egg sauce.
A plain white veal broth of the kind Victorian kitchens kept as a base for other soups and sauces. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredient names have fallen out of use.
- The knuckleVeal knuckle is the shank end of the leg, close to the cut sold as osso buco, and it is chosen for gelatine rather than meat. Ask for it sawn across in two or three pieces so the marrow and joint surfaces are exposed to the water.
- Five pintsCassell's is using imperial pints of 20 fl oz, so this is about 100 fl oz, or a little over 12 US cups. Two pounds of bone-in veal in that much liquid gives a light broth, not a concentrated stock.
- Start cold, never boilThe instruction to pour over cold liquid and simmer gently is the hinge of the recipe. A white soup that boils turns cloudy and grey as fat and albumen emulsify into it; keep it at a bare tremble and skim as directed.
- White thickeningThis is the book's term for a pale thickening of butter and flour in roughly equal weights, worked smooth and whisked into the hot strained soup. Use it sparingly — approaching 1 oz of each per pint already gives a distinctly thick soup — and simmer a few minutes to cook out the flour.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold whole as "blades" or ground. A blade is usually reckoned at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace; use the whole blade in the pot and the ground for the final seasoning, as the recipe implies.
- Rice and sippetsThe two tablespoons of rice go out with the straining unless you keep them back; they act as a mild thickener. The recipe itself offers the option of serving the boiled rice in the soup. Sippets are small squares or triangles of bread fried or toasted crisp, much like a crouton.
- YieldExpect around 8 to 10 servings of broth, plus the drained veal, which is worth serving as a second dish with parsley and butter or egg sauce as suggested. Chilled overnight, it may set to a light jelly.
Veal knuckle was a mainstay of nineteenth-century European stockmaking: high in collagen, mild in flavour, and cheap enough that a household could keep a pot going without sacrificing anything roastable. That neutrality is the point. A cook wanted a base that would carry the flavour of whatever went into it rather than announcing itself, which is why veal stock underlies so much of the classical white sauce repertoire. The construction here, with its onion stuck with a clove, blade of mace and few peppercorns, belongs to the same English tradition as the older "gravy" and "cullis" recipes, but simplified and without the pounded meat and anchovy those often carried. The optional finishes appended at the end show that one pot was expected to be strained and then dressed up in more than one way.