Gravy Soup
INGREDIENTS for large quantity. -6 lbs. of shin of beef, a knuckle of veal weighing 5 lbs., a few pieces of trimmings, 2 slices of nicely-flavoured lean ham 1/4 lb. of butter, 4 onions, 4 carrots, 1 turnip, nearly a head of celery, 3 blades of mace, 6 cloves, a bunch of savoury herbs, seasoning of salt and pepper to taste, 3 lumps of sugar, 6 quarts of boiling soft water. It can be flavoured with ketchup, Leamington sauce, Harvey's sauce, and a little soy. AVERAGE COST, per quart, 1s.
Slightly brown the meat and ham in the butter, but do not let them burn. When this is done, pour to it the water, and as the scum rises take it off; when no more GRAVY, VEAL. appears, add all the other ingredients, and let the soup simmer slowly by the fire for 6 hours without stirring it any more from the bottom; take it off and let it settle; skim off all the fat you can, and pass it through a sieve or cloth. When perfectly cold you can remove all the fat, and leave the sediment untouched, which serves very nicely for thick gravies, hashes, &c.
TIME.-7 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Gravy, Veal (for White Sauces, Fricassees, &c.) - INGREDIENTS.-2 slices of nicely-flavoured lean ham, any poultry trimmings, 2 lbs. of lean veal, a faggot of savoury herbs, including parsley, a few green onions (or one large onion may be substituted for these), a few mushrooms, when obtainable; 1 blade of mace, salt to taste, 3 pints of water. AVERAGE COST, 9d. per pint.
Cut up the ham and veal into small square pieces, put these in a stewpan, moistening them with a small quantity of water; place them over the fire to draw down. When the bottom of the stewpan becomes covered with a white glaze, fill up with water in the above proportion; add the remaining ingredients, stew very slowly for 3 or 4 hours, and do not forget to skim well the moment it boils. Put it by, and when cold take off all the fat. This may be used for Béchamel, sauce tournée, and many other white sauces.
TIME.-3 or 4 hours.
Two recipes run together here: a large-batch brown beef stock served as clear "gravy soup", and a pale veal stock for white sauces. Both are straightforward technique, but the scale, the vessels and the cooling instructions belong to a kitchen with a coal range and a cold larder.
- Scale it downSix quarts of water with 11 lb of bone-in meat needs a very large stockpot, 12 quarts or more, and after six hours' simmering, skimming and straining the finished yield will be well short of the six quarts you started with. Quartering the quantities brings the whole thing within a standard 6-quart pot.
- The cutsShin of beef is the foreshank, sold as beef shank cross-cuts; knuckle of veal is the lower leg joint, and both are order-ahead items at a real butcher. Veal knuckle is what supplies the gelatin, so if it is unavailable use veal or beef marrow bones rather than leaving it out.
- Do not stir, do not boilThis is the hinge of the first recipe. Once the vegetables go in, the pot must sit at a bare shiver — around 185–195F, an occasional bubble — and be left alone for the full six hours. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and breaks up sediment, and the soup will never clear.
- "Soft water"Victorian cooks distinguished soft from hard water because dissolved minerals were thought to toughen meat and cloud stock. Filtered tap water is fine; the instruction makes little practical difference today.
- Blades of mace and a faggot of herbsA blade of mace is one dried piece of nutmeg aril, roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace depending on its size. A faggot (or bunch) of savoury herbs is a bundle tied with string — parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf will do — added whole so it can be lifted out.
- Lumps of sugarThree lumps means three cubes, perhaps a tablespoon in total, though Victorian lump sugar was cut from a loaf and varied in size. The small quantity suggests it is there to round the flavour rather than to sweeten.
- The bottled saucesHarvey's sauce was a commercial spiced anchovy-and-vinegar condiment of the period, and Leamington sauce another proprietary bottled sauce of the same era; Worcestershire sauce is the nearest thing still on the shelf. Mushroom ketchup, still sold, answers to the "ketchup" called for, which at this date would not have meant tomato.
- "Draw down" the vealIn the second recipe the meat is sweated in a splash of water until the juices reduce to a white glaze on the pan bottom — a light fond with no browning. Colour at this stage is a fault, since the point of the stock is that it stays pale for Bechamel and sauce tournee.
- Cooling and keeping"Put it by" until cold assumed a cold larder. Chill stock quickly — shallow pans or an ice bath — get it into the refrigerator within two hours, and use within four days or freeze. The fat cap lifts off cleanly once cold, exactly as described.
"Gravy soup" in Victorian usage meant a clear brown broth of meat and root vegetables, sipped as a first course rather than poured over a joint; the word gravy still carried its older sense of the natural juices of meat. Recipes like this sat at the top of a household hierarchy of stocks, and the entry closes with a note that the sediment "serves very nicely for thick gravies, hashes, &c." — nothing from 11 lb of meat and bone was to be wasted, and the fat, the cloudy dregs and the boiled-out meat all had onward destinations. The second recipe belongs to the French side of the Victorian repertoire: a pale veal stock, kept scrupulously colourless, is the base of sauce tournee and of the meat-enriched Bechamel that nineteenth-century cooks made, unlike the milk-and-flour version usually meant by the name today. The costings in shillings and pence, given per quart and per pint, are a reminder that Beeton's readership was managing servants and a weekly budget as much as a stove.