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Beef Soup
A good soup can be made of the bones and "odds and ends" of the roast, with the usual vegetables and seasonings, but the soup will be better if a little fresh soup meat, or perhaps end pieces from the steak or new roast, be used as well. Put all the meat into a soup-kettle together with a sliced onion, carrot, and a small portion of Russia turnip, some stalks of celery, two or three sprigs of parsley, six cloves, six peppercorns, a bay leaf, and one teaspoonful of salt. Barely cover with cold water and allow it to stand awhile before putting on the stove. Let cook slowly for four or five hours.
Strain and set aside in a cold place for use next day. Remove the fat, season to taste, and serve clear, or with diced vegetables which have been first cooked in water and added to the soup ten minutes before serving. Do not serve this soup the same day in which it is cooked, for it will have a greasy appearance and taste.
Deviled Marrow on Crackers When the marrow is not wanted in the soup, it can be served on crisp crackers for lunch, and makes a nutritious dish. Scrape the marrow-bones, wash them well, and cover top and bottom with paste made of flour and water. Tie in clean cheesecloth, and boil for three-quarters of an hour. Remove cloth and paste, and take marrow out from bones. Season highly with paprika. Serve on crisp crackers.
Beef Croquettes Made from Soup Meat Chop the meat very fine. Season highly with salt, pepper, and celery salt. Add a little grated nutmeg if desired. To two cups of the chopped meat add one beaten egg, and moisten with enough thick tomato sauce (see page 71) to shape into croquettes. Roll in egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Serve with the remainder of the tomato sauce re-heated and thinned.
Soup meat, I lb.
Stock, I cup
Three linked preparations from one roast: a clear stock, the marrow from the bones, and croquettes from the spent meat. The soup is written to be made a day ahead, and that instruction is the whole point of it.
- Make it the day beforeThe overnight rest is not optional here — it is what lets the fat set into a solid cap you can lift off cleanly. Chill the strained stock quickly, uncovered until it stops steaming, then refrigerate; a deep kettle of warm stock left standing in a modern kitchen cools too slowly to be safe.
- Russia turnipThis is rutabaga (swede), not a white turnip. Use a small wedge, perhaps 3 oz — it is sweet and assertive, and more will dominate the pot.
- Soup meatFresh shin, shank or chuck, on the bone if you can get it. The trailing note "soup meat, 1 lb; stock, 1 cup" sits outside both methods and is unexplained; the croquettes as written are moistened with tomato sauce, not stock.
- Cold water, and the standingStarting cold and letting the kettle stand before heating (the book says only "awhile") draws soluble protein out gradually so it coagulates as a scum you can skim, giving a clear soup. Never let it reach a rolling boil, or the fat emulsifies and the stock turns cloudy.
- Four or five hoursAccurate for bones and connective tissue. Fresh lean meat added for flavour will be exhausted well before that; lift it out at about two hours if you intend to use it for croquettes, or it will shred into fibres that will not hold shape.
- The marrow bonesThe flour-and-water paste and cheesecloth are a seal to stop the marrow melting out into the water. Three-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer is right; marrow is soft fat and turns to liquid quickly at a hard boil.
- Deep fatFor the croquettes, 375F. Chill the shaped croquettes thoroughly before breading and frying — warm, loosely bound meat mixture bursts in the fat.
- YieldThe recipe fixes no quantity of water beyond "barely cover", so the yield depends entirely on the bulk of bones and meat. Two cups of chopped meat makes about eight croquettes.
Books of this kind — and there were many, from the 1890s through the First World War — treated the Sunday roast as the first move in a week-long sequence rather than a single meal. The logic on display here is complete: bones and trimmings become stock, the marrow becomes a lunch dish, the boiled-out meat becomes croquettes, and nothing is thrown away but the strained vegetables. Marrow on toast or crackers was a genuinely fashionable savoury in late Victorian and Edwardian dining, served at the end of a formal dinner as well as at lunch, and the flour-paste-and-cloth method of sealing the bone is the standard one given in English kitchen manuals of the period. The instruction not to serve the soup the same day reflects a kitchen without refrigeration, where a cold larder overnight was the only reliable way to lift fat from stock; the advice survives because it still produces a better soup.