Left-Over Soup
1/2 teaspoon celery seed 1 tablespoon salt 1 clove 4 peppercorns Use bones and trimmings from roast beef, beefsteak, bones, and trimmings, mutton chop bones, any cold vegetables, except squash, cold cooked eggs, crusts of bread, and gravies, if any.
For 6 pounds of meat use 4 quarts of cold water, add seasonings, and let simmer six to eight hours, until the meat is in rags and the water reduced to one-half. Strain and set away for stock.
A frugal household stock built from a week's meat scraps rather than bought bones. The proportions are sound; most of the adjustment is in temperature control and in what happens after the straining.
- The hinge: never let it boilSix to eight hours at a bare shiver, with the surface barely trembling, is what keeps the stock clear. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and pulverises the scraps, and no amount of straining will bring the liquid back.
- Scale and yieldSix pounds of bones and trimmings to 4 quarts of cold water reduces to roughly 2 quarts of finished stock. If your scrap pile is smaller, keep the ratio at about 1 quart of water per 1 1/2 lb of bone and meat and reduce the salt accordingly.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in 4 quarts is mild going in but doubles in strength as the liquid halves. If the stock is destined for a sauce or a further reduction, cut it to a teaspoon and season the finished dish instead.
- Cooked eggs and bread crustsBoth were thrown in for economy, and both cloud the stock and give it a starchy, sulphurous edge. Leave them out unless you want a thick peasant broth rather than a clear one.
- Why not squashThe recipe gives no reason. Squash, being soft-fleshed, breaks down and can leave the liquid cloudy and faintly sweet; the same caution would apply to potatoes and to cabbage or other brassicas, which will dominate everything.
- Skim earlyBring the pot slowly to temperature and lift off the grey scum during the first half hour, before it breaks up and disperses. After that the pot can be left largely alone.
- Cooling and keeping"Set away for stock" assumed a cold larder. Cool the strained liquid quickly in a shallow pan or an ice bath, then refrigerate; the fat sets as a cap and can be lifted off the next day. Use within three or four days, or freeze.
- Deepening the flavourRoast beef bones and trimmings already carry browning. If you are working with raw or pale scraps, 30 to 40 minutes in a 425F oven before they go in the pot will get you a darker, rounder stock.
This is a scrap-pot rather than a formal consomme. Thrift was a selling point in household cookbooks of the period. A kitchen that roasted a joint on Sunday might expect the bones, the chop trimmings and the leftover gravy to reappear as Monday's soup base. The instruction to simmer "until the meat is in rags" works as a doneness test for stock: the connective tissue has given up its gelatin and the meat fibres have nothing left to give. The exclusion list is the interesting part of the recipe: naming squash, eggs and bread crusts as fair game or not suggests what was habitually left over in an American household of the period.