Beef Bouillon
Pepper and salt 6 pounds beef and bone 2 quarts water it simmer for five or six hours. sieve, removing all fatty matter. Reheat, seasoning to taste with pepper and salt.
Cut and break the beef and bone, and put it in the water, letting Then cool and strain through a
The text of this entry has been scrambled in the original loose-leaf printing; the sentences run out of order. Read in sequence it is: cut and break the beef and bone, put it in the water, simmer five or six hours, cool and strain through a sieve removing all fat, then reheat and season with pepper and salt.
- The proportion is the whole pointSix pounds of meat and bone to two quarts of water is roughly three times the meat-to-water ratio of a modern stock. Bouillon of this period was meant to be strong enough to drink from a cup on its own, not to be a base for something else.
- Meat and bone, not bones alone"Beef and bone" means shin, shank or a piece of neck with the bone in — actual muscle contributing flavour, plus bone and connective tissue for body. A bag of bare marrow bones will not give the same result.
- Simmer means simmerFive or six hours at a bare tremble, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and gives a cloudy, greasy bouillon that no amount of straining will fix.
- Cool before you strainThe instruction to cool first is deliberate: chilled fat sets into a solid cap that lifts off cleanly, which is far more effective than skimming warm liquid. Refrigerate overnight and lift the disc off in the morning.
- Cool it quicklyA stockpot of hot liquid left on the counter sits in the bacterial danger range for hours. Decant into shallow containers, or set the pot in a sink of iced water, and get it into the refrigerator within a couple of hours.
- Season only at the endThe recipe salts twice in its garbled state, but the sensible reading is that seasoning happens on reheating. Five hours of reduction concentrates whatever salt went in at the start.
- YieldExpect roughly a quart to five cups of finished bouillon from two quarts of water after that long a simmer — four to five cup servings.
Bouillon in an American cookbook of this era sits somewhere between food and medicine. It was the standard thing carried up to a sickroom, offered to convalescents and served in cups at afternoon receptions, which is why the recipe is so heavily weighted toward meat: the strength of the broth was understood as its nourishing value, in an age when beef tea and meat extracts were sold as tonics. The word is simply the French for a boiled liquid, from bouillir, to boil; it had been current in English for some time before the nineteenth century, when French soup terminology of this kind became familiar in American households. Unlike consommé, which is clarified with egg white to a glassy transparency, bouillon was expected only to be strained and degreased — a plainer, more domestic thing.