Bortchock Soup
6 lbs. shin of beef 3 qts. cold water 1 cup carrot cubes 1/2 cup sliced onion 6 cloves 1 allspice berry 2 sprigs parsley 2 stalks celery 1 beet finely cut 1 tablespoon salt 1 teaspoon peppercorns 2 tablespoons butter Prepare and cook beef vegetables in butter five with remaining seasonings. Cook one and one-half hours, strain, cool quickly, remove fat, and clear. When ready same as for Bouillon. Cook vegetables in butter five minutes; then add to soup to clear, add one cup finely chopped raw beet and one-fourth cup vinegar. Select red beets for this soup, and serve as soon as possible after clearing, otherwise it will lose its bright red color, which makes the dish especially appropriate for an American Beauty Dinner. 1 small ox-tail
The text as printed is scrambled — a line of type has clearly dropped out — but the method underneath is the standard Boston Cooking-School bouillon: a long-simmered beef stock, clarified, then coloured and sharpened with raw beet and vinegar at the last moment. Read it as a clear soup, not a chunky borscht.
- The hinge: colour is added lastBeet cooked in the stock turns brownish and muddy. The bright red comes from the cup of finely chopped raw beet and the vinegar stirred in after clarifying; the acid stabilises the betanin pigment. Serve within minutes, as the recipe warns.
- Reconstructing the missing lineThe intended sequence is: cut up the beef and oxtail, cook the vegetables in butter five minutes, add all to the cold water with the remaining seasonings, and simmer. "When ready same as for Bouillon" means clarify with beaten egg white and shell, then strain through cheesecloth.
- Cooking timeOne and a half hours is short for six pounds of shin and an oxtail; three to four hours at a bare simmer is the usual allowance for drawing out gelatin and flavour.
- Shin and oxtailShin of beef is the foreshank, sold as beef shank cross-cut. Ask for it bone-in — the marrow and connective tissue are the point. Oxtail is still sold under that name, though it now comes from cattle of either sex.
- ClarifyingCool the strained stock, lift the solid fat off, then whisk in an egg white and its crushed shell per quart, bring slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, and let the raft form. Ladle the liquid out through a cloth rather than pouring.
- The allspice berryOne whole berry for three quarts may well be as intended; allspice is assertive and this is a background note. Bruise it lightly with the flat of a knife and put it in with the cloves and peppercorns.
- VinegarPlain cider or white wine vinegar. A quarter cup in three quarts of stock reads sharp on paper but is close to right for borscht — add half, taste, then adjust.
- YieldRoughly two and a half quarts after skimming and clarifying, or eight to ten cups as a first course. Serve very hot in bouillon cups, with a spoonful of sour cream offered separately if you like.
"Bortchock" is one of several attempts American cookbooks made at spelling the Ukrainian and Russian borshch before "borscht" became the usual English form. What the Boston Cooking-School offers is not the peasant soup — a thick pot of beets, cabbage and whatever else is at hand — but the beet soup as reworked by nineteenth-century restaurant cooking: a clarified consommé, coloured at the last second, poured into cups. The clue is the closing line about the "American Beauty Dinner." American Beauty was a deep crimson rose, hugely fashionable in the 1890s and 1900s, and colour-themed dinners in which every course echoed a single shade were a feature of formal entertaining in that period. A soup that could be relied on to arrive at the table a clear, brilliant red earned its place on the menu for that reason as much as for its taste.