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Clear Vegetable Soup
5 quarts of cold water, I turnip, I white potato, 1 cup of peas, I tomato, 1 tablespoonful of rice.
Put the shin in a large kettle, cover with water, simmer gently three hours. This may be done the day before, if you wish. Then strain, remove every particle of fat from the surface and return to the soup kettle. If you make it the day before, the fat when cold, will float on the surface
The text as printed is defective: the ingredient list names only vegetables and rice, but the method begins "Put the shin in a large kettle," and the instructions break off mid-sentence. What follows fills the gaps a competent cook will notice.
- The missing shinA shin (shank), almost certainly of beef, is the intended base; no weight is given. Despite the title, this is a meat broth flavoured with vegetables, not a meatless soup, and the shin's collagen is what gives the clear stock its body.
- The water is the measureFive quarts is a lot of liquid for one shin, and the printed method says to cover the meat with water rather than to use the five quarts. How much you lose in three hours depends on the pot and the lid, so judge the strength of the broth by taste; if it is thin, start with less water or reduce it after straining.
- Simmer, never boilThis is the hinge of the whole dish. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and dislodges fine particles, and no amount of straining will clear the result afterward. Keep the surface at a bare tremble and skim the grey scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Vegetables go in lateThe instructions stop before saying when. Add the diced turnip, potato, tomato and rice to the strained, degreased broth and cook 20-25 minutes; the peas need only the last five. Three hours in the pot with the meat would reduce them to pulp and cloud the broth.
- DegreasingThe book's own advice is the best method: chill the strained stock overnight and lift off the solid cap of fat. If you are working the same day, blot the surface with strips of paper towel or draw them across it.
- Clear does not mean consomméA truly clear soup wants straining through a cloth-lined sieve without pressing the solids. If you want it brilliant, chill and clarify with egg white and shell before the vegetables go in — but a well-skimmed shin broth is clear enough for this recipe's purposes.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed; seasoning is often left unstated in recipes of this sort. Salt at the end, after any reduction, or the broth will overshoot.
- YieldThe finished quantity depends entirely on how much water you start with and how far it falls; the recipe gives no yield. The boiled shin meat is worth keeping for hash or a salad rather than returning to the pot.
Clear soups were a point of pride in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery, and a cook's competence was often said to be judged partly on whether her broth was transparent. The style is generally traced to the French service of the period, where consomm\cloudy one signalled a careless kitchen, and a shin or shank was the cut of choice on both sides of the Atlantic because it is cheap, gelatinous and full of flavour without much fat. The garbled state of this particular entry \ vegetables listed, meat only implied, instructions cut off in mid-sentence \ is not unusual in printed recipe collections of the era. That the tomato appears here as a single unit rather than a quantity is itself dated: tomatoes were still frequently counted rather than weighed.