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Quick Mutton Broth
Pour one pint of cold water over one pound of lean mutton, chopped very fine. Let stand until the water turns very red. Then simmer for ten minutes. Strain and season with salt. Serve hot with toasted crackers.
An invalid-cookery broth of the beef-tea type: cold-water extraction first, brief heat second. The whole point is the soaking, not the cooking.
- The hinge is the cold soakCold water draws out the soluble proteins and pigment that give the broth its colour and savour; hot water sets the surface proteins at once and draws out less. Give it 30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator, not on the counter; the recipe's own cue is that the water turns very red.
- "Chopped very fine" means very fineSurface area is doing all the work in ten minutes. Trim every scrap of fat and sinew and mince the lean to a coarse paste, or run it briefly in a food processor. Whole cubes will give you tinted water and nothing else.
- Do not let it boilA hard boil coagulates the dissolved protein into grey scum and leaves the broth thin and cloudy. Bring it up slowly to the barest tremble and hold it there for the ten minutes.
- The ten minutes is not a stock timeThis is not meant to extract gelatine from bone or connective tissue, which would take hours. It is a quick meat infusion, and it will taste like lightly salted meat essence, not like a rich stock. Judged as what it is, the timing is correct.
- Cut of muttonMutton is sheep over about two years old and is uncommon in most markets; lamb leg or shoulder, well trimmed, is the usual substitute and will be milder. Use the leanest piece you can find, since fat that renders out will need skimming.
- Yield and seasoningOne pint of water over one pound of meat will give somewhat less than a pint of finished broth after straining and squeezing the solids, about one invalid's serving. Salt at the end and taste as you go.
- Toasted crackersPeriod recipes mean plain hard water crackers or dry toast fingers, not a seasoned cracker. Their job is to give something to chew alongside a liquid meal.
- StorageMeat broth made this lightly spoils quickly. Refrigerate at once and use within two days, or freeze it.
Broths like this belong to the nineteenth-century tradition of invalid cookery, the branch of household cooking devoted to feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young. Beef tea, mutton broth, chicken jelly and barley water appear in many general cookbooks of the period, often in a chapter of their own, on the widely held assumption that the strength of meat lay in its juices and could be transferred to a patient in liquid form. The cold-water extraction step turns up again and again in these recipes, on the understanding that heat coagulated the soluble matter they were trying to draw out. The nutritional theory has not survived, since such broths are mostly water, salt and a little protein, but the technique produces a clean, distinctly meaty liquid.