Clear Soup
Clear Soup is made from a shin of beef, or from beef and veal. Crack the bones, and cut the meat into fine pieces. Cover with cold water in the proportion of one quart of water to a half pound of meat and bone. Bring to the simmering point and keep it at that temperature for several hours. To have good clear soup, the temperature must be kept even.
If the water boils vigorously, the gelatines of the meat do not dissolve and so a portion of the good is lost. It is a mistake to skim off the scum during the cooking, because this is a needful part of the meat. Cool and skim off the fat. Re-heat, adding the flavorings: an onion, with a few cloves stuck into it, a small carrot chopped fine, a teaspoon of celery seed, a teaspoon of Larkin Black Pepper, two tablespoons of Larkin Table Salt. To make perfectly clear, add the white and shell of an egg, remembering that the soup must be cold when these are added. Bring to a boil but do not boil, and serve.
This process is the basis of all soups made from meat, no matter what kind, and the stock thus made can be kept for several days.
A basic beef consommé worked out in the days before bouillon cubes. The whole thing turns on temperature: this is a long, barely-moving simmer, not a boil.
- Hold it at 180-185F"The simmering point" here means the surface trembling with the occasional bubble, not a rolling boil. Hard boiling emulsifies fat and breaks up the coagulated proteins into a permanent haze, which is the reason the recipe is so insistent about even heat.
- Shin of beefAsk for cross-cut beef shank, bone in — the collagen in the shank is what gives the finished stock body. Veal knuckle or veal breast does the same job with a milder flavor. Have the butcher saw the bones; "crack the bones" was a task for a cleaver and a heavy block.
- The proportionOne quart of water per half pound of meat and bone is generous with liquid by modern standards. Three pounds of shank takes about six quarts, and several hours of low simmering will reduce that by roughly half; expect some further loss at the straining and clarifying stage.
- Ignore the advice about scumThe grey foam that rises in the first half hour is coagulated albumin, and leaving it in is precisely what clouds a stock. Skim it off patiently as it appears; the egg clarification later has less work to do.
- Larkin pepper and saltLarkin was a mail-order house, and the brand names are advertising. Use any black pepper and salt — but two tablespoons of salt is a great deal for three quarts. Add a teaspoon, taste after the stock has reduced, and correct at the end.
- The egg raftThe stock must be cold, or near it, before the beaten white and crushed shell go in, otherwise the white sets in threads instead of forming a raft that traps the sediment. Bring it slowly to just below a boil, let it stand ten minutes off the heat, then ladle carefully through a cloth-lined strainer without disturbing the raft.
- Celery seedA full teaspoon of celery seed is assertive and slightly bitter in a delicate consommé. Half a teaspoon, or a stalk of celery with its leaves, gives the same background without dominating.
- Keeping it"Several days" assumed a cold larder and a layer of fat sealing the top. Refrigerated, use within three or four days; it freezes well for several months, and reduced hard it sets firm enough to cut into cubes.
Clear soup, or consommé, was the opening course expected at any formal turn-of-the-century dinner, and the ability to produce a stock you could read print through was a standard by which a cook was judged. The method described here — long low extraction, then clarification with egg white and shell — is much older than the nineteenth-century French professional kitchens often credited with it, appearing in English and Continental cookery well before that, and it has changed remarkably little. The Larkin brand names woven into the ingredient list mark this as a cookbook issued by a mail-order company: firms of the period gave away recipe collections that named their own soap, spices and table salt at every opportunity, and the pantry advice is inseparable from the sales pitch. The claim that the scum is "a needful part of the meat" reflects a genuine period argument about whether skimming threw away nourishment, a debate settled long ago in favor of the skimmer.