Chicken Broth
Use the legs of a chicken for this dish.
Break the joints and cut up the meat into small strips. Pour over it four cups of water, add one tablespoon of rice and half a teaspoon of salt, then allow it to simmer very slowly for an hour and a half. Strain out the rice and meat and cool. Skim off the fat and reheat as much of the broth as is required. In hot weather the rice may sour the broth, so make without and keep the soup in a tightly corked jar in the refrigerator.- E. M. K.
An invalid's broth rather than a stock — thin, lightly seasoned, and meant to be drunk from a cup. A few points make the proportions and keeping instructions read sensibly today.
- What "legs" meansThe leg of a chicken means thigh and drumstick, bone in. Bone-in is the point; the collagen and marrow are what give the broth body.
- Break the jointsCutting through the joint and slashing the meat exposes more surface and lets the marrow out. A heavy knife or cleaver on a board, or ask the butcher to do it.
- The simmer is the hinge"Very slowly" means barely trembling, around 180-190F with an occasional bubble. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth, which for a clear invalid's cup was the whole thing to avoid.
- Rice as thickenerOne tablespoon of raw white rice in four cups of water softens and breaks down over the hour and a half, leaving a faint starchy body — though the recipe still has you strain the rice out, so it does not vanish. Long-grain rice tends to hold together more than short-grain and gives less.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt to four cups is deliberately under-seasoned by current standards, since this was food for the sick. Taste and adjust at the end if it is going to the table.
- Yield and reductionFour cups of water will reduce over an hour and a half of slow simmering, by how much depending on how closely the pot is covered; expect two or three cupfuls of finished broth.
- Chilling and skimmingCooling fully in the refrigerator lets the fat set into a solid cap you can lift off in one piece, which is far cleaner than skimming a warm pot.
- The souring warningWritten for iceboxes and larders. Refrigerated at 40F or below, a rice broth keeps three or four days; the risk the note describes is cooked starch fermenting at room temperature. A "tightly corked jar" is any sealed container — but cool the broth quickly, in a shallow pan, before it goes in.
- Don't waste the meatThe strained leg meat is bland but perfectly good shredded into a sandwich or a salad.
Chicken broth of this kind sat in the sickroom rather than at dinner, and nineteenth-century household manuals treated it as something close to medicine: a small quantity of lean meat, long and gentle extraction, minimal salt, fat removed so the invalid's stomach would not rebel. The rice is not there for flavour but for a little nourishing starch, a trick shared with barley water and gruel. The initials at the end — E. M. K. — suggest a signed contribution rather than a house recipe, which may be why it carries a practical aside about hot weather. The keeping instructions are a reminder that "refrigerator" in this period could still mean an insulated wooden box cooled by a block of ice, warmer and less reliable than anything in a kitchen now.