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White Soup, Portable
Procure as fine a leg of veal as can be got, remove the whole of the skin and fat, chop in pieces two dozen fowls' feet, wash them well, put them with the veal into a large iron kettle with three gallons of water, stew until the meat is tender enough to separate, then cover down close, and stew gently for eight hours; take a tea-cup and fill it with the soup; set it where it can quickly cool. It when cold it is hard enough to cut with a knife, strain the soup through a sieve and remove all the fat, pour into cups the clear jelly, put them into a stewpan with boiling water until they are like glue; let them cool, and when nearly cold run a ring round them and turn them on a piece of new flannel; it will draw all the moisture out of them; turn them in seven hours, and continue until they are quite hard. Put them in tin canisters in a dry place. When any is required, cut a piece about the size of a walnut, pour a pint of boiling water upon it, stir until the soup is dissolved, season with salt; it will make a basin of strong broth. If for soup, steep some vermicelli in water, boil it, then to one cake of the soup pour one pint of water. If two quarts or four pints of soup are required, take four cakes of the soup, and when melted, set it over the fire and simmer, pour it into a soup-tureen, add thin slices of bread very lightly toasted, and upon them the vermicelli; season to taste.
WHITE STOCK FOR SAUCES AND SOUPS (to make a large quantity). Take a large stewpan perfectly tinned, butter it well, and line the bottom with thin slices of lean ham. Lay upon these some lean veal cut into pieces about two inches square, and also any bones and trimmings of veal or poultry there may be; an old hen will be a valuable addition. Pour in as much stock as will cover the meat; cover the stewpan, and boil the liquor thickly till it is of the consistency of gum. Draw it back before it can acquire any colour, and fill the stewpan with common stock. Add a handful of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, two onions, each stuck with three cloves, half a blade of mace, and a few peppercorns. Simmer the stock gently for about two hours, carefully removing the scum as it rises, strain through a sieve, and put it aside till cold. Remove the fat from the top, and pour the liquor off free from sediment before using it. In filling up the stewpan it should be remembered that a quart of stock should be allowed for each pound of veal and fowl combined.
Two entries run together here: a portable soup (a dried gelatine concentrate, the ancestor of the bouillon cube) and a conventional white stock. The portable soup cannot be made safely in a domestic kitchen, and the reasons are worth understanding.
- What the first recipe actually isThis is not soup but glue in the literal sense — veal and fowls' feet boiled until the collagen has all converted to gelatine, then reduced and air-dried into hard cakes. The test given (a cup of the liquor setting firm enough to cut with a knife when cold) is a gelatine-strength test, not a doneness test.
- The uncontrolled drying is the failure pointThe cakes are set on new flannel and turned every seven hours until "quite hard" — potentially days at room temperature. A cooked, low-acid, low-salt, protein-rich mass held in that range can support spoilage and food-poisoning bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, whose toxin is not destroyed by the later boiling water. Nothing in the method measures moisture, salt or temperature, so there is no way to know whether the cakes have dried past the point where bacteria can grow or have simply spoiled slowly on the cloth.
- Storage compounds the problem"Tin canisters in a dry place" is not a hermetic seal, and a cake that is hard on the outside can still hold enough water at its centre to support mould and bacterial growth over weeks of storage. Commercial stock concentrates achieve stability through vacuum evaporation, controlled water activity and sterile packing — none of which is reproducible with flannel and a tin. If you want a keeping stock base, use a current recipe with measured reduction and freezing, or a commercial glace.
- Fowls' feetTwo dozen chicken feet are still sold at Asian and Latin American butchers and are a legitimate gelatine source; they must be scalded and the outer skin and nails removed, which this recipe assumes without saying. The quantity is enormous because the whole point is maximum collagen extraction.
- The vessel and the scaleThree gallons of water in a "large iron kettle" over eight hours is a 19th-century range-top operation, not a domestic hob one. The second recipe's "stewpan perfectly tinned" refers to the tin lining of a copper pan; the concern was metallic taint in a pale stock, which stainless steel makes irrelevant.
- Reading the white stockThe second entry is an ordinary double stock and is unremarkable by modern practice. "Boil the liquor thickly till it is of the consistency of gum" means reduce the first liquid to a sticky glaze before adding the bulk of the stock, and "draw it back before it can acquire any colour" is the whole discipline of a white stock — any browning of the ham or veal disqualifies it. The working ratio it gives is a quart of liquid per pound of veal and fowl combined.
- Half a blade of maceMace blades are the dried aril of nutmeg; half a blade is roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though ground mace loses aroma quickly and is not a straight substitute.
Portable soup was travellers' and sailors' food before it was a convenience product. Recipes for it appear in English cookery books from the middle of the eighteenth century onward — Hannah Glasse gives one — and it was carried on naval voyages as an antiscorbutic hope and a source of hot broth; Cook's ships are generally said to have shipped it by the hundredweight. The principle is simply that gelatine, dried hard, keeps and re-dissolves, so a stock could be reduced to cakes that a soldier or explorer could cut with a knife. By the time Cassell's was compiled the idea had been industrialised: Liebig's meat extract and, later, the wrapped bouillon cube did the same job with equipment no household could match, which is why this entry reads like a survival from an older book rather than working advice.