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Beef Soup Stock (Brodo di Carne)
1 pound of round of beef 2 quarts of water 2 small, new carrots, or 1/2 of an old carrot 1/2 pound of beef bones 2 small potatoes I onion I tomato, fresh or canned Parsley Boil the beef, bones, and vegetables in two quarts of water over a slow fire--adding pepper and salt. Skim occasionally, and after two hours add two table-spoons of sherry; then strain through fine soup-strainer or cheese-cloth. This is the basis of all the following soups, except when otherwise stated.
To make this stock richer, add a turkey leg to above receipt; boil one and a half hours, then add one-half a pound of finely chopped beef. Cook for half an hour longer, then strain.
To make meat jelly, add a little gelatine to the soup stock five minutes before straining.
To give a good dark color to the stock, add a few drops of "caramel," which is prepared in the following manner:
Put three tablespoons of granulated sugar into a saucepan with a little water, and until the sugar has become dark and reddish; then add a little more water and boil again until the sugar is melted. Strain and pour into a bottle when the caramel will keep perfectly for several weeks.
A plain long-simmered beef broth of the kind that underpins the rest of the soup chapter. Nothing here is unsafe; the changes are mostly about temperature control, yield and the vagueness of the original's quantities.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to "boil ... over a slow fire" means what we would call a bare simmer, with the surface barely trembling. A true rolling boil emulsifies fat and breaks up scum, and the broth turns cloudy and greasy no matter how carefully you strain it later.
- Skim early, not lateMost of the grey foam rises in the first fifteen or twenty minutes as the meat proteins coagulate. Take it off then and the "skim occasionally" of the next two hours becomes almost nothing.
- Round of beefTop or bottom round, a lean cut from the hind leg. It gives clean flavour but no body; the half pound of bones is doing the gelatine work, so ask for knuckle or marrow bones rather than rib trimmings.
- Two quarts is a starting volumeAfter two hours at a simmer, uncovered, expect to strain out roughly five to six cups. That is four to six servings as a clear soup.
- The potatoesTwo small potatoes will shed starch and slightly cloud the finished stock. If you want a clear brodo, leave them out and the rest of the recipe is unaffected.
- Sherry at the endThe two tablespoons go in near the finish so the aroma survives. Added at the start it would simply cook off over two hours.
- Meat jelly"A little gelatine" is unhelpfully vague. Reckon on about one envelope, roughly two and a quarter teaspoons of powdered gelatine, per two cups of hot strained stock, using less for a softer, spoonable set; bloom it in cold water first.
- The caramel colouringThe verbatim text drops a word: cook the sugar and water until it has "become dark and reddish," which is well past the pale stages and close to burning. Adding the second dose of water to a very hot dark caramel spits violently, so stand back and add it warm.
- Turkey leg variationA turkey leg for two quarts of liquid gives a broth that reads as poultry more than beef. It works, but it is a different soup, and the half pound of chopped beef added for the last half hour may be there to push the flavour back toward the beef side.
This is the opening recipe of the soup chapter in Simple Italian Cookery (1912), published under the name Antonia Isola, and it does the job that brodo does in Italian home cooking generally: it is not a dish so much as the thing the rest of the chapter is built on, which is why the author says outright that it is "the basis of all the following soups." The word brodo simply means broth, and in Italian kitchens the same pot traditionally yielded two courses, the strained liquid served over pasta or rice and the boiled meat eaten afterwards with a sauce, a habit the recipe here quietly abandons by saying nothing at all about what becomes of the pound of round. The bottled sugar caramel for colour is a mark of the period rather than of Italy: recipes for burnt-sugar colouring to keep bottled are common in American and English cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and commercial gravy brownings were sold alongside them.