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Beef Soup (Take bones and trimmings)
Take bones and trimmings from a sirloin steak, put over fire after breakfast in three quarts water, boil steadily until about an hour before dinner, when add two onions, one carrot, three common-sized potatoes, all sliced, some parsley cut fine, a red pepper, and salt to taste. This makes a delicious soup, sufficient for three persons. All soups are more palatable seasoned with onions and red pepper, using the seeds of the latter with care, as they are very strong.
A thrift soup built on the bones left from a steak, and it works as well now as it did then, provided you understand what the vague clock references mean.
- The actual timing"after breakfast until an hour before dinner" in a period household, where dinner was often the midday meal, could mean anywhere from about three to five hours at a bare simmer. Expect appreciable reduction over that time; top up if the water falls much below the bones.
- Boil steadily means simmerA hard boil emulsifies fat and clouds the stock. Keep it at a lazy bubble and skim the grey scum off in the first twenty minutes, which is the difference between a clean broth and a muddy one.
- Roast the bones firstThe recipe puts them in raw, which gives a pale, mild stock. Browning the bones and trimmings in a hot oven, 425F, for half an hour before they go in the water costs nothing and doubles the depth of flavour.
- The red pepperThis is a whole dried hot pepper, not paprika and not a sweet bell pepper. The note about the seeds is sound: add the pod whole, taste after fifteen minutes, and pull it out when the heat suits you.
- Vegetables in the last hourOnion and carrot can take the full hour; sliced potato will collapse into the broth well before that. If you want the potato to hold its shape, give it twenty-five minutes.
- StrainingThe original leaves the bones in. Lift them out before serving and pick off any meat worth keeping, then return it to the pot.
- YieldThe recipe claims "sufficient for three persons." Served as a main dish with bread rather than as a first course it will stretch less far.
This is a bone-broth economy recipe of the sort that fills the opening pages of nineteenth-century American cook books, where a soup was rarely made on purpose from bought ingredients but assembled from what the butcher's cut had left behind. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox in the 1880s and drawing much of its content from the earlier Northern-compiled Buckeye Cookery, assumes a kitchen with a fire already burning all morning for other work, so a five-hour simmer costs nothing but water. The closing remark about onions and red pepper is worth a look: cayenne and small dried hot pods were familiar seasoning in the period's cookery, and the warning about the seeds tells the cook exactly where the heat is concentrated.