Barley Soup
INGREDIENTS.-2lbs. of shin of beef, 1/4 lb. of pearl barley, a large bunch of parsley, 4 onions, 6 potatoes, salt and pepper, 4 quarts of water. AVERAGE Cost, 4d. per quart.
Put in all the ingredients, and simmer gently for 3 hours.
TIME-3 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
A one-pot household soup of the plainest kind: everything goes in cold and stays there for three hours. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to supply, chiefly about cutting, skimming and when to season.
- The measures are imperialMrs Beeton's quart is 40 fl oz, so 4 quarts is about 4.5 litres — noticeably more than 4 US quarts. Scale down by a quarter if you want a manageable pot; 2 lb of shin in 4.5 litres of water gives a thin, frugal broth by design.
- Cost, 4d. per quartFour old pence per quart, in pre-decimal currency. The figure is there because these books were sold as budgeting tools as much as cookbooks, and shin was among the cheapest cuts on the block.
- Shin of beefSold as shin, foreshank or beef shank, usually bone-in and sliced across. The collagen is the whole point: it needs the full three hours to soften, and it is what gives the soup body. Ask for it bone-in and leave the bone in the pot.
- Start cold and skimMeat covered with cold water and brought slowly to a simmer releases scum in the first fifteen minutes. Lift it off before the barley clouds the surface, or the finished soup will be grey and murky.
- Cut the vegetablesThe recipe says nothing about preparation. Dice the onions and cut the potatoes into rough 2 cm pieces. Over three hours they will soften considerably and break at the edges, thickening the broth a little.
- Pearl barleyA quarter pound is about 115 g, a little over half a cup. It needs no soaking and will swell to three or four times its volume, so the soup thickens considerably as it sits. Loosen with hot water when reheating.
- Tie the parsleyA large bunch means stalks and all. Tie it with string and lower it in whole so it can be fished out at the end — three hours of loose leaf gives you olive-drab shreds throughout. A handful of fresh chopped parsley stirred in at the finish is worth more than the bunch that boiled.
- Season at the endSalt and pepper appear in the ingredient list with no timing. Add them after the meat is tender: salting early in a long simmer that reduces as it goes is how these soups end up over-seasoned.
- YieldRoughly 3.5 to 4 litres of finished soup, feeding eight to ten as a first course or six as a supper on its own. Lift out the shin, shred the meat off the bone and return it before serving.
Barley is among the oldest grains in the British kitchen — a bread grain of the poor long before wheat became affordable — and by the nineteenth century its main survival in English cooking was largely in soups and in beer. Pearl barley, the grain scoured of its hull and bran, keeps well in a dry larder and swells enormously in liquid, which made it a common thickener for household broths. This recipe belongs to the plain-cookery end of Mrs Beeton's book: a cheap boiling cut, root vegetables, one grain and water, with the per-quart cost printed so a mistress could check her housekeeping arithmetic. Its close relation is Scotch broth, which substitutes mutton for beef and usually adds root vegetables and dried peas. "Seasonable all the year" marks it out in a book that notes the season for most dishes — barley, onions and potatoes all stored, so this was one of the few soups with no closed season.