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Mutton Broth
3 lbs. mutton (from the neck) 2 quarts cold water 1 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 3 tablespoons rice or 3 tablespoons barley Wipe meat, remove skin and fat, and cut in small pieces. Put into kettle with bones, and cover with cold water. Heat gradually to boiling-point, skim, then season with salt and pepper. Cook slowly until meat is tender, strain, and remove fat. Reheat to boiling-point, add rice or barley, and cook until rice or barley is tender. If barley is used, soak over night in cold water. Some of the meat may be served with the broth.
A plain restorative broth of the kind that appears in every American cookbook of the period. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the assumptions behind it have changed.
- The cutMutton neck is rarely stocked in the United States; lamb neck, shoulder or shanks will do the same work, and 3 lb bone-in is the right weight. Keep the bones in the pot — they are doing most of the flavoring.†
- Cold water startBeginning in cold water and heating slowly is the hinge of the recipe. It draws soluble protein out of the meat and floats it as scum you can skim, which is what keeps the broth clear; dropping the meat into boiling water sets that protein inside the meat instead.
- "Cook slowly"Hold the pot at a bare shiver, around 185F, never a rolling boil. Neck and shoulder need 2 to 2 1/2 hours to become tender; a hard boil in the same time will give you cloudy broth and stringy meat.
- Skimming and defattingMutton fat sets hard and tastes strongly of tallow when cold, which is why the recipe insists on straining and removing it. Chilling the strained broth and lifting the solid cap off is far more effective than skimming while hot.
- BarleyModern pearl barley does not need an overnight soak; 40 to 50 minutes of simmering in the broth is enough. Hulled or pot barley, still sold today, does benefit from soaking, though period recipes commonly directed soaking for pearl barley as well.
- RiceThree tablespoons of rice is a deliberately light hand; it thickens the broth slightly rather than making a soup of it. Long-grain rice takes about 18 minutes in the simmering broth.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt for two quarts is thin by current taste, and a little goes out with the broth clinging to the strained solids. Taste and correct after the grain has cooked.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts after skimming and reduction — four to six servings as a first course, or two as a light meal with some of the meat cut up and returned to the pot.
Mutton broth in a book like Fannie Farmer's sits at the border between cooking and nursing. Late nineteenth-century domestic manuals routinely grouped broths of this sort with invalid cookery: light, strained, barely seasoned, and thought to be nourishment that a convalescent could take when solid food was refused. The barley is part of that tradition — barley water and barley broths were standard sickroom fare in Britain and America long before they were dinner. The recipe also reflects a meat market that no longer exists. Mutton, the meat of a sheep more than a year old, was common and comparatively cheap in American cities in the late nineteenth century; the neck was among the least expensive cuts, full of bone and connective tissue and suited to nothing but long, slow moisture. As American taste shifted decisively toward young lamb over the twentieth century, both the meat and this style of frugal, bone-driven broth largely dropped out of household cooking.