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Portable Soup for Travellers
246. Take three large legs of veal, one of beef, and the lean half of a ham; cut them in pieces, put a quarter of a pound of butter at the bottom of a large stock-pot, then lay in the meat and the bones, with two ounces of mace, pepper and salt to taste; add three carrots, and four or five sticks of celery cut small. Cover the pot close, and set it over a moderate fire; keep taking out the gravy with a spoon as it is drawn out, till you have taken the whole. Then cover the meat with water, and set it on the fire again. Boil slowly for more than four hours; then strain the liquor through a sieve into a pan, and allow it to boil till reduced to one quarter of the original quantity. Next strain the gravy which was taken from the meat, and add it to the soup, with some cayenne and ketchup, and a little Indian soy. Boil again slowly, skimming off the fat as it rises, till it looks like a thick glue Pour it into earthen dishes, and cut it out with round tins a little larger than a crown-piece, dry them on dishes in the sun, carefully turning them, and store them in tins, with writing-paper between each layer. This is useful in families: one cake with a pint of boiling water will make good broth, or with less water a good gravy. It will keep long.
This is portable soup: a meat glaze reduced so far that it sets to a rubbery cake, then dried and stored dry as a travelling ration. The chemistry is sound in principle, but the preservation step as written cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen.
- Why the drying step failsWhy the drying step is uncertain -- Cakes of meat glaze keep only if they are dried far enough, and salty enough, that water activity falls below the point at which bacteria and moulds can grow. Sun-drying on open dishes gives no control over temperature, humidity or endpoint, and the recipe offers no way to tell a finished cake from a merely leathery one. A cake still moist at the centre is a low-acid, high-protein food stored at room temperature.
- Scale and holding timeScale -- Three legs of veal, a leg of beef and the lean half of a ham is something like forty to fifty pounds of meat, worked over two long boilings and a further reduction. This is a production-scale job, not a domestic saucepan one.
- If you want the resultUse a current recipe for demi-glace or meat glaze and keep it frozen or refrigerated rather than dried and shelf-stored. Commercial stock concentrates exist for exactly the purpose this recipe was written to serve.
- Reading the ingredientsTwo ounces of mace is an enormous quantity by modern standards and reflects period taste. Indian soy is soy sauce, an imported bottled seasoning in British kitchens of the period; ketchup here means a thin mushroom or walnut ketchup, not the tomato sauce.
- "Drawing out the gravy"The first stage is a dry-heat sweat: the covered pot over moderate heat pulls concentrated juices from the meat, which are spooned off and reserved so they are not diluted or overcooked in the long water boil. That reserved liquid is added back at the end for flavour.
- The size of a cakeA crown-piece was a coin roughly an inch and a half across, so the cakes were cut a little larger than that -- each one intended to make a pint of broth.