Soup
As making soup is a tedious process, it is best to make enough at once to last several days. Beef shank is most generally used in making nutritious soup. It is best to get this the day before using it, and soak it all night in cold, clear water. If you cannot do this, however, get it as early in the morning as you can. Break the bones, wash it, soak it a few minutes in weak salt and water, and put it in a large boiler of cold water. As soon as it begins to simmer, remove the dark scum that rises on top. Keep the boiler closely covered, and boil very slowly till an hour or two before dinner. Then, with a ladle, remove all the fat from the top, as it is this element that makes soup unwholesome. Strain and season, or, if you prefer, season just enough for one meal, reserving the rest as foundation for another sort of soup. It is well always to keep some of this stock on hand in cold weather, as by the addition of a can of tomatoes, or other ingredients, a delicious soup may be quickly made of it. Never throw away water in which any sort of meat has been boiled, as it is much better to simmer hash or a stew in this liquor than in water, and it is also invaluable for basting fowls or meats that have not been parboiled.
Directions for soup making are so fully given in the following pages that it is needless for me to say anything further on the subject here.
This is the book's general method for beef stock, the foundation it assumes for the soups that follow. Two instructions carry the whole thing: the pot must never rise above a bare simmer, and the fat must come off before the stock is used.
- Never let it boil"Boil very slowly" means a bare simmer, with only occasional bubbles breaking the surface at around 180-190F. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and agitates the bones into the liquid, and no amount of later straining will clear it.
- "Boiler" means a large potIn this book a boiler is simply a big lidded stockpot or kettle, not a double boiler and not a laundry copper. Use a tall, narrow pot if you have one; less surface area means slower evaporation over a long simmer.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. A workable ratio is about 4 lb of beef shank, cut across into rounds, to 4 quarts of cold water, which yields roughly 3 quarts of stock. Ask the butcher to saw the bones rather than breaking them yourself.
- Timing"Till an hour or two before dinner" from an early-morning start means 5 to 8 hours. Shank collagen needs at least 4 hours to convert to gelatin; beyond about 8 the meat has given up everything it has and the flavor flattens.
- The overnight soakSoaking draws out blood and soluble proteins, which coagulate into the dark scum the recipe tells you to remove. It is optional if you skim attentively for the first 20 minutes, when most of the scum appears. Skim with a shallow spoon rather than stirring it back in.
- Removing the fatFar easier cold than hot: refrigerate the strained stock and lift the solid cap off the next day. The claim that fat makes soup "unwholesome" is period digestive theory, but the practical point stands, since fat left in makes a greasy, dulled broth.
- Keep it partly uncoveredA tightly covered pot traps enough heat to push a slow simmer up to a boil unattended. Set the lid ajar and check it every hour.
- Season at the endSalt only after reducing and straining, as the original advises for portions you serve immediately. Salt added at the start concentrates unpredictably over a long simmer.
- Storage, which has changed"Keep some of this stock on hand in cold weather" assumes a cold larder or springhouse, and period practice generally involved boiling stock up again periodically to keep it sweet. Do not hold stock at room temperature. Cool it quickly in a shallow pan or an ice bath, then refrigerate up to 4 days or freeze for several months.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from the contributions of some 250 Virginia housekeepers, opens its soup chapter with exactly this sort of preface: not a dish but a system. Stockmaking of this kind was the hinge of a thrifty pre-refrigeration kitchen, turning a cheap, tendon-heavy cut into several days of meals, which is why the writer treats the pot liquor from any boiled meat as too valuable to pour away. The insistence that fat is "the element that makes soup unwholesome" reflects a long-standing belief, common in nineteenth-century domestic writing and inherited from older humoral ideas about digestion, that fats burdened the stomach; the same conviction shows up in period instructions to skim gravies and to serve broths clear. Beef shank remained the standard soup cut on both sides of the Atlantic well into the twentieth century, valued for the gelatin in its connective tissue and the marrow in its sawn bone rather than for its meat.