Mutton Broth
Place in a kettle three pounds of a neck of mutton from which the fat has been cut, and chopped into small pieces, with six pints of water. Boil, skim, set the pan to the rear of the stove, where it can simmer for an hour. Add three ounces of washed rice, with a turnip and some celery. Simmer for two hours.
Strain, free from fat and salt.
A plain restorative broth of the kind every late-Victorian household kept in its repertoire. Two lines need translating before you start: the vague final instruction, and the assumption that you own a coal range.
- "Strain, free from fat and salt"This most likely means strain the broth, lift or blot off the fat, then salt it; the unpunctuated phrasing leaves the reading probable rather than certain. Chilling the strained liquid and lifting the solid fat cap is easier than skimming it hot.
- "The rear of the stove"On a coal range the back was the coolest spot, holding a pot just below a boil. On a gas or electric hob that is your lowest setting, or 200-210F in the oven with the lid ajar. A rolling boil will cloud the broth and toughen the meat.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over about two years old, rarely stocked in American supermarkets now. Lamb neck or a bone-in lamb shoulder cut into 2-inch pieces gives the same gelatin and a milder flavor; ask the butcher to saw the neck across the bone.
- MeasuresSix pints is 12 cups. Three ounces of rice is a scant half cup of long-grain by volume. A "turnip" here is the white turnip, roughly 6-8 oz; "some celery" is two or three ribs with their leaves.
- Rice timingTwo more hours of simmering will break the rice down almost completely, and the broth is strained in any case. If you want the grains intact, cook them separately and add them to the strained liquid.
- SkimmingSkim in the first ten minutes, while the gray protein scum is still rising and before it breaks up. Once the pot has boiled hard the froth disperses and the broth is harder to clear.
- YieldPerhaps a quart to a quart and a half after three hours of simmering and straining, depending on how briskly the pot cooks. The strained meat is worth picking off the bone for a hash or shepherd's pie rather than discarding.
Mutton broth belongs to the branch of nineteenth-century cookery called invalid or sickroom cooking, and it served a practical end: feeding the ill as well as the well, so that broths like this appear in domestic guides alongside beef tea, barley water and arrowroot gruel. The method here is the older European one of extraction rather than flavor-building, with no browning, no aromatics beyond turnip and celery, and rice added as much for its starch and body as for taste. Sheep were the cheap meat animal across Britain well into the twentieth century, and the neck was among the cheapest cuts, bony and gelatinous and better suited to long simmering than to roasting. Mutton's decline in American kitchens after the First World War is generally traced to the growth of a market for younger lamb and to the strong flavor of older sheep falling out of fashion, which is why a recipe like this now reads as more exotic than it was ever meant to be.