Brilla Soup
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 10 persons.-4 lbs. of shin of beef, 3 carrots, 2 turnips, a large sprig of thyme, 2 onions, 1 head of celery, salt and pepper to taste. 4 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 8d.
Take the beef, cut off all the meat from the bone, in nice square pieces, and boil the bone for 4 hours. Strain the liquor, let it cool, and take off the fat; then put the pieces of meat in the cold liquor; cut small the carrots, turnips, and celery; BROWNING. chop the onions, add them with the thyme and seasoning, and simmer till the meat is tender. If not brown enough, colour it with browning.
TIME.-6 hours.
A plain long-boiled beef broth of the sort Victorian households made from a cheap cut. The text as printed here has picked up stray headings from neighbouring pages of the book — "How to Carve a Brill" and "Browning" belong to other entries and are not part of the method.
- Shin of beefAsk for beef shank, bone in, about 4 lb. Have the butcher saw the bone into two or three lengths so it fits the pot. The long boiling of the bone, together with the connective tissue in shin, is what gives the stock its body.
- Quantities in modern terms4 quarts in a British book is imperial measure: roughly 4.5 litres. Use a stockpot large enough that the bone stays covered through a long simmer. The recipe gives it as sufficient for 10 persons.
- "Browning"This was a bottled colouring made from sugar cooked to a dark caramel, sometimes with a little water and salt; recipes for it vary. Modern gravy browning is much the same thing, and a teaspoon of dark caramel will do the same job. A few drops of soy will colour it too, but will also add flavour.
- Skim before, not afterBring the bone up slowly and skim the grey scum off in the first twenty minutes. Once it has boiled hard it disperses and the finished soup will be cloudy no matter how long you strain it.
- The two-stage cooking is deliberateThe two-stage cooking -- The bone goes in alone for its four hours; the cubed meat only goes into the cooled, degreased liquor afterwards. One effect is that the meat stays in recognisable pieces rather than shredding. Give it 1½ to 2 hours of gentle simmering, not a rolling boil.
- VegetablesCarrots, turnip and celery cut small will collapse in two hours of simmering. Add them for the last 40 minutes if you want them to hold their shape, and pull the thyme sprig out before serving.
- SeasoningSalt at the end. The volume reduces considerably over six hours, and broth salted early ends up sharp. Pepper is better ground in at the table.
- Total timeThe stated six hours is accurate but almost all of it is unattended. The overnight route is easier: boil the bone one day, chill the liquor, lift the set fat off in a sheet, and finish the soup the next.
The name is a puzzle: nothing in the ingredients has anything to do with brill, the flatfish, and the recipe is a beef broth. The text as printed has plainly picked up stray fragments from elsewhere in the book — "How to Carve a Brill" and "Browning" — though whether that has any bearing on the title "Brilla" the text cannot tell us. What the recipe itself represents is the backbone of Victorian household economy: shin, the muscle of the foreleg, was among the cheapest cuts on the block, full of connective tissue that dissolves into gelatine over hours of low heat. The stated cost of 3s 8d for ten people made it the sort of dish Mrs Beeton's readers were expected to serve without apology. Cooking the bone first and adding the cut meat to the cooled liquor afterwards is a genuinely good technique, and one found in other nineteenth-century cookery books.