Beef Soup
2 pounds shin of beef. 4 tablespoons butter. 2 onions. 2 carrots. 1 stalk celery. 2 bay leaves. 1 teaspoon sweet marjoram 2 whole allspices 2 whole cloves Pinch of mace Salt and pepper 2 quarts cold water 1 tablespoon cornstarch Cut the beef into small pieces; put it in a pan with the butter and brown over a hot fire. Take out the meat and put it in a large kettle with the onions, carrots and celery all chopped fine; add the seasoning and water; bring to a boil and skim well. Set aside to simmer, closely covered, six or eight hours; then strain and set away. Next day remove all the fat from the top and boil half an hour. Thicken with a tablespoon of cornstarch mixed with a little cold water; boil three minutes and serve.
A long-simmered clear beef broth, browned first for colour, then defatted overnight and lightly thickened. The printed ingredient list on this leaf is incomplete — the quantities for beef, butter and vegetables have been lost — so treat the method as the recipe and supply the amounts yourself.
- Missing quantitiesFor 2 quarts of water, figure 2 to 2 1/2 lb of beef (shin, shank or chuck), 2 tablespoons butter, one onion, two carrots and two stalks of celery. The original gives none of these numbers, so this is a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- Brown hard, then deglazeThe browning is where the flavour comes from, and the fond left in the pan is half of it. Pour a little of the cold water into the hot pan, scrape, and add that to the kettle rather than leaving it behind.
- Start in cold waterThe instruction to add 2 quarts of cold water is deliberate. Cold water draws soluble protein out slowly so it rises as scum that can be skimmed; boiling water sets it in the pot and clouds the broth.
- Simmer, never boilSix to eight hours is not excessive for shin, but the pot must stay just below a tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and no amount of overnight chilling will pull it back out.
- Whole spices, and maceWhole allspice and cloves are still sold as written. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed; a pinch of ground mace is right, and ground nutmeg at half the amount is the nearest substitute.
- The overnight chill"Set away" means store it somewhere cold overnight; a refrigerator is the modern equivalent. The fat sets into a solid cap that lifts off in one piece, which is far cleaner than skimming warm soup. Do not skip this step and expect the same clarity.
- Cornstarch thickeningOne tablespoon in 2 quarts gives a barely perceptible body, not a gravy. Slurry it with 2 tablespoons cold water, stir into simmering soup, and hold the three minutes — undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky.
- Salt at the endSix hours of reduction concentrates whatever you add at the start. Season lightly going in and correct after the final half-hour boil.
- YieldRoughly 5 to 6 cups of finished soup, depending on how much liquid is lost during the long covered simmer and the final half-hour boil; enough for four as a first course.
Recipes like this one belong to the era when stock was a weekly household routine rather than a carton on a shelf, and the two-day method — simmer, chill, lift the fat, finish — appears widely in American and British cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The seasoning here is conservative and old-fashioned: sweet marjoram, whole allspice, clove and a pinch of mace, a combination common in English-derived cookery. The page reaches us with its ingredient list cut off mid-column, so the opening of the recipe, with the quantities for beef, butter and vegetables, is missing.