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Celery (Sprig parsley bay leaf Wipe)
1 sprig parsley 1/2 bay leaf Wipe meat and cut in inch cubes. Put one-half in kettle with marrow-bone, water, and tomatoes. Brown remaining half in hot frying-pan with some marrow from bone, then turn into kettle. Heat slowly to boiling-point, and cook at temperature just below boiling-point five hours.
Cook ham and vegetables with butter five minutes, then add to soup with peppercorns, salt, parsley, and bay leaf. Cook one and one-half hours, strain, cool quickly, remove fat, and clear.
This is the classic brown stock/consommé method from Fannie Farmer's soup chapter, and the page has lost most of its ingredient column — only the parsley and half bay leaf survive at the top. The procedure is complete enough to work from, but you will need a standard brown stock ratio to fill in the quantities.
- The missing ingredientsThe quantities are not on this page and cannot be recovered from it. A brown stock of this type would take a few pounds of shin of beef with the marrow-bone, several quarts of cold water, some tomato, a thin slice of lean raw ham, and diced carrot, turnip, onion and celery sweated in butter, with peppercorns and salt. Any figure you supply is your own estimate, not the book's.
- The hinge: half raw, half brownedStarting half the meat in cold water extracts gelatin and clear savour, while browning the other half in marrow builds colour and roasted flavour. Skipping the raw half gives a darker but thinner, cloudier stock.
- "Just below boiling-point"Hold the pot at 180-190F — a lazy shiver at the surface, no rolling bubbles. A true boil emulsifies fat and albumin into the liquid and clouds the stock, which is more work to clear later than to avoid now.
- Marrow-boneAsk a butcher for a split beef shin or femur; the marrow is used here as the browning fat. If you cannot get marrow, a spoonful of beef dripping does the same job.
- Vegetables go in lateFive hours would reduce carrot, turnip and onion to sweet mush and cook the aroma out of them. The five-minute butter sweat, then ninety minutes in the pot, is deliberate — leave it as written.
- "Cool quickly"The page does not say how, though setting the kettle in cold water was the usual period method, and it matters. Get a large pot of stock out of the 40-140F range fast: divide it into shallow pans or use an ice bath, then refrigerate. The fat lifts off as a solid disc the next day.
- "Clear"Nineteenth-century shorthand for clarifying: whisk a lightly beaten egg white with its crushed shell into the cold, degreased stock, bring it slowly to a simmer without stirring once the raft forms, hold ten to fifteen minutes, then ladle through cheesecloth. This step is what turns brown stock into consommé and is optional if you only want soup base.
- YieldNot recoverable from this page, since the water and meat quantities are missing. Whatever volume you start with, expect to lose some to five hours of reduction and more in the straining.
Brown stock is the foundation of the French classical kitchen, and its appearance in Fannie Farmer's soup chapter shows how thoroughly restaurant practice had been translated for the American household by 1896. The two-part treatment of the meat — half steeped from cold water, half seared — reflects a professional approach in which colour and clarity were understood as separate problems requiring separate solutions. The thin slice of ham and the cup of tomatoes are often said to serve as correctives: one for depth, one for acidity. That a domestic cookbook expected a reader to keep a pot below boiling for five hours, then clarify it with egg white, says a good deal about a kitchen with a coal range always warm and a cook in it most of the day.