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Barley Soup
Make with some mutton a good soup, then wash a teacupful or so of pearl barley in two or three waters, and boil in plenty of fresh water for two hours. Strain the liquor from it, rinse in cold water and set one side. Cut two slices of turnip, and half that quantity of carrot and onion into small dice-shaped pieces all of one size and boil them in a soup-stock until tender, say three-quarters of an hour. Cut up about as small size as much meat as there was turnips and add to the soup. Follow by adding the cooked barley and chopped parsley, seasoning slightly.
A two-pot method: the barley is cooked and rinsed separately so its starch never clouds the mutton broth. That separation is the whole point of the recipe and the only step worth being strict about.
- The hinge: rinse the barleyPearl barley sheds a great deal of starch. Boiling it apart, straining and rinsing it in cold water keeps the finished soup clear and loose rather than gluey. If you cook the barley in the broth you get a thick porridge, which is a fine thing but not this dish.
- A teacupfulPeriod teacups were smaller than a modern mug and are usually read as somewhere between 3/4 cup and 1 cup. That gives roughly 2 to 3 cups of cooked barley. The recipe never says how much soup it is for, so judge the proportion by eye.
- Two hours is too longPearl barley sold today is tender in about 30 to 40 minutes. Taste at 25 minutes; two hours will burst the grains entirely.
- "A good soup" with muttonThe recipe leaves this entirely open. In practice, a stock simmered from a bony cut of mutton -- neck, shoulder or shank -- then strained and skimmed of fat. Lamb shoulder or shank is the usual substitute today and is milder.
- Two slices of turnipDeliberately vague. Read it as about 1 cup of diced turnip, with carrot and onion at half that -- whether half each or half between them is not clear from the text. Cutting them to one uniform size matters more than the exact volume, since they go in together.
- Vegetable timingThree-quarters of an hour will reduce small dice to mush. Fifteen to twenty minutes in simmering stock is enough for a 1/4-inch dice; the turnip goes soft first.
- The meatDiced to match the vegetables and added near the end. The recipe does not say where it comes from; meat lifted off the stock bones is the obvious source. Long reboiling makes it stringy.
- Seasoning and yieldSeasoning -- Season the finished soup to taste and add the parsley off the heat. The recipe gives no quantity of stock and no yield, so scale to the pot you have.
Barley was the everyday thickener of European soup long before rice or pasta reached the same tables, and mutton-and-barley broth is the plainest form of a dish found across Scotland, Ireland, Poland and the German-speaking lands — Scotch broth, krupnik, Graupensuppe. Its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's kitchen served a full menu of homely potages alongside the lobster and terrapin: hotel dining rooms of the 1890s ran long soup lists, and a clear mutton broth with neatly cut vegetables was a test of a kitchen's discipline rather than its extravagance. The insistence on dice "all of one size" is the professional habit showing through; so is the separate cooking of the barley. Pearl barley itself is simply hulled barley polished in a rotating drum until the bran is gone, a process established in commercial mills at some point in the nineteenth century.