H. P. C
To prepare a Beef's Head as Stock for Soup.
Cut up the head into small pieces, and boil in a large quantity of water until it is all boiled to pieces. Take out all the bones as for souse cheese, and boil again until thick. Then while hot, season very highly with pepper, Salt, catsup, allspice, and onions chopped fine.
Put into a mould to get cold. For a small family cut a thick slice, say five inches square, whenever you want soup in a hurry, adding about a quart of water. It need cook for a few minutes only, and is valuable as keeping well and being ready in times of emergency. By adding a few slices of hard boiled egg and a gill of good cooking wine, this soup may have very nearly the flavor of mock turtle.--Mrs. A. M. D.
This is a portable soup — a beef-head stock reduced until it sets hard enough to slice, so that a cup of soup is a few minutes' work rather than a day's. The whole thing hinges on reducing far enough: if the cooled block will not stand up to a knife, it has not been boiled down enough.
- Sourcing the headA whole beef head is a special order from a butcher and will not fit a domestic pot. Ask instead for split beef cheeks, shin and a couple of pounds of sawn neck or knuckle bones, which give the same balance of meat, cartilage and gelatin.
- "Boiled to pieces"Expect several hours at a bare simmer, perhaps 5 to 7, never a rolling boil, which clouds the stock and emulsifies the fat into it. The meat should collapse when pressed and the bones slip free clean.
- "As for souse cheese"Souse, or head cheese, is the pressed jellied loaf made from the same parts. The direction simply means pick out every bone, gristle knob and tooth fragment by hand before the second boiling.
- The second boilingStrain, skim the fat hard, then reduce the liquid by three-quarters or more. You want a syrupy mass that sheets on a spoon and sets rubber-firm when a teaspoon is chilled on a saucer.
- CatsupIn 1879 this was as likely mushroom or walnut catsup as tomato — thin, dark, salty and sharp, closer to Worcestershire than to modern bottled ketchup. A tablespoon or two of mushroom ketchup gives the intended savour; tomato ketchup makes it sweet.
- A gillHalf a cup. "Good cooking wine" here would most likely mean madeira or sherry, added off the heat to the finished soup, not boiled into the block.
- Season high, then check coldSalt and pepper read much flatter in a cold jelly than in hot soup. Taste a spoonful diluted with water rather than tasting the concentrate.
- Storage, which is the real changeA cool larder was expected to keep this for weeks in the nineteenth century; a reduced meat jelly at room temperature is not something to attempt now. Set it in a shallow pan, cut into cubes, and refrigerate up to four days or freeze for several months.
- Yield and dilutionA five-inch square slice of the set jelly to a quart of water is roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cupful of concentrate, depending how thick the slice is cut, to four cups of water -- two to three servings. Heat only to a simmer, taste, and thin further if it is too intense.
Reduced meat jellies of this kind were called portable soup, and they were the household ancestor of the stock cube: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooks boiled bones and trimmings down to a glue-firm cake that travelled well, kept in a cool larder and reconstituted with hot water. The finish here is hard-boiled egg and good cooking wine, to imitate mock turtle, the standby substitute for real turtle soup, which long meant a calf's head dressed up with wine, spice and egg to stand in for the green fat and gelatinous meat of the turtle. Using the beef's head at all belongs to the same frugal economy as souse cheese, mentioned in passing as something the reader would already have made: the head was cheap, rich in collagen, and yielded both a jelly and a meal. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered such contributions from named and initialled correspondents, which is why the recipe arrives credited to Mrs. A. M. D. and assumes a competent cook who needs no timings.