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Italian Soup
After a cow-heel has been used for making jelly, cut the flesh off into small pieces. Put one-half teacupful of sage into a stewpan with sufficient water to cook it, and boil until dissolved. Take a sufficient quantity of clear stock to make the soup, and place it in a saucepan over the fire until boiling. Warm the pieces of meat in the soup, put the sago at the bottom of a soup-tureen with one ounce of grated Parmesan cheese, pour the hot soup over them and serve with a plate of sippets of toast, or small croutons of bread that have been fried to a delicate brown in butter.
A thrift soup built on the leftovers of a stock-making session: gelatinous meat from a cow-heel, sago for body, Parmesan for savour. Two words in the original need untangling before anything else.
- "Sage" is a typesetting error for sagoThe first instruction says sage, the last says sago, and only sago makes sense — you boil it until it dissolves and it thickens the soup. Half a teacupful of dried sage boiled in water would be undrinkable. Read it as sago throughout.
- Cow-heelThe foot of a cow or calf, simmered long for its gelatin; it is what gives the jelly referred to in the first line. Butchers rarely stock it now, though halal and Caribbean shops often do. Any braised, well-gelatinised beef trimming will stand in, cut small.
- A teacupfulIn books of this period the teacup is reckoned variously, commonly anywhere from four to six fluid ounces, so half a teacupful of sago might be a quarter-cup or as much as six tablespoons. The recipe gives no stock quantity against which to judge it.
- Cooking the sagoSmall pearl sago needs around 15-20 minutes in plenty of simmering water, stirred so it does not clump, and is done when the grains turn from white to translucent. The recipe says to boil it until dissolved and gives no instruction to drain it.
- Quantity of stock"a sufficient quantity" leaves it to the cook. The recipe specifies neither the volume nor the kind of clear stock, and no quantity can be derived from the single ounce of Parmesan.
- SippetsNarrow fingers or small triangles of bread. The recipe offers a choice: sippets of toast, or small croutons of bread fried to a delicate brown in butter. Either way they are served on a separate plate, as instructed, so they stay crisp.
- Assembly mattersThe sago and cheese go into the tureen and the hot soup is poured over them. Do not boil the Parmesan in the soup — it strings and settles out. The heat of the stock is enough to melt it through.
Sago — starch extracted from the pith of tropical palms — reached European and American kitchens through the colonial trade and was for decades a standard thickener for soups, puddings and invalid diets, sitting alongside tapioca and arrowroot on the grocer's shelf. What makes this "Italian" is the Parmesan, often said to have served as shorthand for Italian cookery much as it does on many menus now. The recipe's real subject, though, is economy: a cow-heel boiled down for jelly left behind perfectly good meat that no professional kitchen would throw away. Recipes like this one, tucked among the grander dishes, show the frugal underside of a hotel that traded on extravagance.