Beef Soup
Crack the bone of a shin of beef, and put it on to boil in one quart water. To every pound meat add one large teaspoonful salt to each quart water. Let it boil two hours and skim it well. Then add: 4 turnips, pared and cut into quarters. 4 onions, pared and sliced. 2 carrots, scraped and sliced. 1 root of celery, cut into small pieces. When the vegetables are tender, add a little parsley chopped fine, with salt and pepper to the taste. Serve hot.--Mrs. P McG.
Another Recipe for Beef Soup.
One shin beef in one-half gallon water, put on before break fast and boiled until dinner. Thicken with brown flour two or three hours before dinner. Put in one carrot, two turnips, one onion, thyme, cabbage, and celery seed.--Mrs.
Two versions of the same long-simmered shin broth, both written for a cook who could leave a pot on the back of the range all morning. The instructions on water are the one place where the original will mislead you.
- The water quantity is ambiguous"one quart water" cannot cover a whole shin, and the salt rule that follows ("to every pound meat... to each quart water") suggests the writer may have been thinking in quarts per pound. Read it as roughly a quart of water per pound of meat and bone, which for a 4-5 lb shin means 4-5 quarts. The second version's half-gallon is likewise on the low side and will need topping up.
- Shin of beefBeef shank, cross-cut, bone in, marrow intact. Ask the butcher to saw rather than crack it; the point is to expose the marrow and collagen. Four to five pounds gives about three quarts of finished soup, serving eight.
- Salt at that rateA large teaspoon per pound of meat per quart of water compounds fast on a big shin. Salt with half of it, then adjust at the end after the liquid has reduced, or the finished soup will be inedible.
- SkimmingSkim during the first twenty minutes, while the grey protein foam is still rising, not after two hours. Keep the pot at a bare tremble; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth.
- Root of celeryMost likely celeriac rather than a stalk of celery, though the phrase could also mean the root end of an ordinary celery plant. If you cannot get celeriac, use three or four ribs of celery with their leaves and add a pinch of celery seed.
- Vegetable timingTurnips in quarters and sliced carrots are tender in 25-35 minutes. The original gives no time, only "when the vegetables are tender"; add them near the end and the soup keeps some definition instead of turning to pulp.
- Brown flourIn the second recipe this means flour dry-toasted in a skillet until it smells nutty and goes the colour of sand. Whisk it with a little cool broth to a slurry before stirring it in, and give it at least fifteen minutes to lose the raw taste; the original's two or three hours is more than it needs.
- ServingLift out the shin, pull the meat from the bone, discard gristle, and return the meat to the pot. Chilling the broth overnight lets you lift the fat off in a sheet, and the flavour is better the second day.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is a book of attributed recipes, and the two initialed versions here show the method rather than a fixed formula: a shin was the cheapest cut on the animal, all bone and connective tissue, and the household that could put it on "before breakfast and boil it until dinner" was one with a wood or coal range already lit for the day's baking. That is the real economy of the dish. The vegetable list -- turnips, onions, carrots, celery root -- is the standard Anglo-American soup bunch of the period, and the second cook's toasted "brown flour" is an older thickening habit, a dry roux made without fat.