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Pepper (Quickly to boiling-point then)
quickly to boiling-point, then let simmer until meat is tender. Remove meat and strain stock. Chill, remove fat, reheat, and add wine, beef extract, and cream. Season with salt and pepper. 4 lb. fowl Knuckle of veal 3 qts. cold water 1 onion, sliced 6 slices carrot 1/2 bay leaf 1 sprig parsley
The page picks up mid-sentence — the opening line, which would have told you to cover the fowl and veal knuckle with the cold water and bring it up, is on the preceding page. What survives is a clear white-stock soup: long simmer, strain, chill, degrease, enrich. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The missing first stepPut the fowl and the veal knuckle in the pot with the 3 quarts of cold water, bring rapidly to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer. Starting in cold water is deliberate: it draws out gelatin and albumen slowly and gives a clearer stock than a hot start.
- What "simmer until tender" means in hoursA 4 lb fowl in Farmer's day was a stewing hen, tough and full of flavour, and could take three hours or more. A modern supermarket bird of the same weight is a young roaster and will be tender in about 90 minutes. Pull the bird when the meat gives, and let the veal knuckle carry on for the body.
- Knuckle of vealThe lower leg joint, sold today as a veal shank or osso buco cut, occasionally as a veal knuckle bone at a butcher counter. It is there entirely for gelatin — it is what makes the chilled stock set. A pound or so of veal bones, or split pig's trotter, does the same job if veal is unavailable.
- Beef extractBovril, Bonox or a similar dark meat extract in a jar, not a stock cube and not modern liquid "beef base," which is generally saltier. The book gives no quantity here; a teaspoon in three quarts is about the level at which it reads as depth rather than as bouillon. Add it before the salt and taste again after.
- Wine and cream, unquantifiedNeither amount survives on this page. For a three-quart soup, something on the order of half a cup of sherry or Madeira and a cup of cream or thin cream would suit, but those figures are a suggestion, not something the book states. Add both off the boil — cream held at a rolling boil in a wine-acidulated stock can curdle.
- The chilling step is not optionalRefrigerating the strained stock overnight lets the fat set into a solid cap you can lift off whole. Skimming hot stock leaves a greasy film that no amount of enrichment will hide, and this soup has nothing in it to mask it.
- Salt lastThree quarts reducing over several hours concentrates everything already in the pot, and the beef extract brings its own salt. Season only after the extract, wine and cream are in.
- Yield and the leftover fowlExpect roughly two quarts of finished soup after simmering and straining, about eight cups. The cooked fowl is not wasted: period cookbooks commonly turned it into croquettes, creamed chicken or a salad, and it is still worth more than the stockpot.
This belongs to a family of clear, lightly enriched fowl soups that filled the first pages of the soup chapter in American cookbooks around 1900 — stock built on a bird and a gelatinous veal joint, cleared and degreased, then finished with sherry, cream and a spoonful of commercial meat extract. The extract is the period detail. Concentrated beef extracts had been industrial products since the middle of the nineteenth century and were marketed hard to housekeepers as a way to give a pale stock the savoury depth that would otherwise take a second pot of browned beef bones. Fannie Farmer's book is thoroughly of its moment in treating the jar as a legitimate seasoning rather than a shortcut to apologise for. The knuckle of veal is equally of its moment: cooks got body into a soup by choosing a joint that supplied it, and a stock that set firm when chilled was the visible proof the pot had been managed properly.