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Stew Soup, of Salt Meat
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons. - Any pieces of salt beef or pork, say 2 lbs.; 4 carrots, 4 turnips, 4 parsnips, 4 potatoes, 1 Suitable for a winter cabbage, 2 oz. of oatmeal or ground rice, seasoning of salt and pepper, 2 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d. INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.—Any pieces of salt beef or pork, say 2 lbs.; 4 carrots, 4 turnips, 4 parsnips, 4 potatoes, 1 cabbage, 2 oz. of oatmeal or ground rice, seasoning of salt and pepper, 2 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
This entry gives quantities and cost but no method, which was common in the economical-cookery pages of Beeton — the technique was assumed. A few notes on the ingredients and on what the missing instructions would have been.
- The garbled line"1 Suitable for a winter cabbage" looks like a typesetting or transcription collision, with wording from an adjacent marginal note (Beeton's entries carry "Seasonable" and "Sufficient" tags) dropped into the ingredient list. Read it as one cabbage.
- Soak the salt meat firstBarrelled salt beef or pork carried far more salt than today's corned beef. Soak it in several changes of cold water for at least 12 hours, or the soup will be inedible. Add no salt until the very end, and taste before you do.
- The implied methodSalt meat goes into the cold water and comes slowly to a simmer, skimmed; it needs 2 to 2½ hours before the root vegetables go in, and the cabbage only in the last 15 minutes so it does not turn grey and sulphurous.
- Oatmeal or ground riceTwo ounces is a thickener, not a cereal course. Stir it in as a slurry with cold water about 30 minutes before serving, or it will sink and catch on the bottom.
- Liquid is tightTwo quarts of water for 2 lb of meat and sixteen root vegetables plus a cabbage produces something closer to a thick pottage than a soup, and it will reduce further over three hours. Add water as needed if you want eight bowls of it.
- Cost as a guide1s. 10d. for eight servings is Beeton's point rather than a detail — roughly 2¾d. a head. The recipe exists to use up salt-barrel scraps, so "any pieces" genuinely means trimmings, shin and hock ends, not a centre cut.
- YieldEight portions as written, but as a one-pot meal with bread rather than a first course.
Salt meat soup belongs to the household economy that ran underneath Victorian cookery books: before reliable refrigeration, beef and pork were preserved in brine barrels, and the tough, salty, awkward pieces left at the bottom were exactly the material for a long, slow pot of soup thickened with oatmeal. The oatmeal is a Scottish and northern English habit that Beeton records without comment — ground rice is simply offered alongside it. Entries like this one, priced to the penny and portioned for eight, sit in the book alongside far grander dishes because Beeton's readership included mistresses of very modest households.