Scotch Broth
3 ounces barley 3 pints water 4 peppercorns 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 ounce carrots 1 ounce turnips 1 ounce onions or leeks 1 ounce celery 1/4 pint peas--fresh or bottled 3 teaspoons chopped parsley Put the barley, water, peppercorns and salt into a saucepan, and boil for one hour. Put the water and two tablespoons of the barley back into the saucepan. Cut the carrot, turnip and onion into small dice, and the celery and leek into small slices, and add them, with the peas, to the barley, etc. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the parsley, and serve.
If bottled peas are used, they should not be added until the vegetables are tender.
A thin, frugal broth in the British idiom — imperial measures, vegetables weighed rather than counted. Two lines need untangling before you start.
- The strange barley instructionAfter the hour's boil you are meant to strain the pot, then return the liquid plus only two tablespoons of the cooked barley. The recipe does not say what becomes of the rest. If you want a thicker broth, simply leave all the barley in; nothing else changes.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so 3 pints is 60 imperial fl oz, about 7 US cups. The 1/4 pint of peas is 5 fl oz by volume, about 2/3 cup.
- An ounce of each vegetableOne ounce is roughly a third to a half of a medium carrot, or a small handful of diced onion — genuinely small amounts, deliberately so. Doubling or tripling the vegetables gives a fuller broth and no harm done.
- TurnipThe recipe does not specify which turnip is meant. A small white turnip or a swede (rutabaga) will both serve, the swede giving a sweeter, earthier result; in Scotland 'turnip' commonly denotes the swede.
- Bottled peasBottled or canned peas are already fully cooked and collapse if simmered; that is why the original holds them back. Frozen peas behave the same way — three or four minutes at the end is enough. Fresh shelled peas can go in with the diced roots.
- PeppercornsFour whole peppercorns will drift about and end up in someone's spoon. Tie them in a scrap of muslin with the parsley stems, or crack them coarsely and accept the speckles.
- SeasoningWith no meat, bones or stock, half a teaspoon of salt in seven cups of water is very restrained. Taste at the end and correct; a little of the vegetable cooking water's sweetness comes through better with adequate salt.
- Yield and timingAbout one hour for the barley, then 20-25 minutes for the diced vegetables. The recipe gives no yield.
Scotch broth in its usual form is a mutton soup with barley and root vegetables, the barley thickening the liquor as it swells. This version strips the meat out entirely, keeping the name and the shape of a familiar dish, dropping the flesh, and letting the barley do the work of body and the parsley the work of freshness. Books of meatless cookery proliferated in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century and again during the First World War, serving vegetarians on principle, Lenten and fast-day cooks, and households simply short of money or meat. The barley is the point. Pot and pearl barley were cheap, filling and long-keeping.