Mutton Soup
Boil a nice leg of mutton, and take the water for the soup, add two onions chopped fine, potato, half a cup of barley, and two large tomatoes; season with pepper and salt, boil one hour, stir often (as barley is apt to burn), and, before taking from the fire, add one table-spoon flour wet with cold water. - Mrs. E. R. Fay, New York City.
A thrifty second-day soup built on the liquor from a boiled leg of mutton. The recipe assumes you have already cooked the joint and are looking at a pot of broth.
- Start with the brothThe soup depends entirely on the cooking water from the mutton, so salt the boiling liquid lightly at the start and skim the scum as it rises. If you have no mutton leg, lamb shoulder or shanks simmered two to three hours give a comparable base; plain lamb stock will do.
- Mutton versus lambMutton is sheep over about two years old, stronger in flavour and fattier than the lamb sold in most supermarkets. Halal and Caribbean butchers still carry it. If you use lamb, expect a milder soup and a leaner broth.
- Skim the fatA boiled leg throws a great deal of fat. Chill the broth and lift the solid cap before making the soup, or the barley will sit in grease.
- Quantities the recipe omitsNo volume of broth is given. Half a cup of pearl barley suits roughly two to three quarts of liquid; less than that and the soup sets into porridge. "Potato" means one or two, peeled and diced.
- Barley and the stirringThe warning about burning is real. Pearl barley sinks and catches on a thin pot bottom, so use a heavy pan and stir up from the base. One hour is about right for pearl barley; hulled barley wants closer to ninety minutes.
- TomatoesTwo large fresh tomatoes, chopped, skins and all. Out of season, a cup of drained canned tomatoes is closer to what a period cook would have had from her own jars than a pale winter tomato.
- The flour thickeningWetting flour with cold water before it goes in is what keeps it from lumping. Add it in a thin stream while stirring and give it three or four minutes at a simmer to lose the raw taste. Barley releases a good deal of starch already, so a single tablespoon may be more than the soup needs.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities of broth, so any yield is an estimate. On the two to three quarts suggested above, reckon six to eight servings as a first course, four as a main with bread.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most late-nineteenth-century American compilations, was assembled from contributed recipes, and the signature here — Mrs. E. R. Fay of New York City — is part of the point: such books carried the names and home towns of their contributors. The dish itself is older than the book and not distinctively Southern. Barley-thickened mutton broth is a fixture of British and Scottish cookery, where the boiled leg was the dinner and the liquor became the next day's soup; the tomatoes look like an American addition, made at a time when the tomato was becoming widely popular in the United States from the 1830s onward. Mutton was still common on American tables in the 1880s, when sheep were kept as much for wool as for meat and older animals came to market; the near-total disappearance of mutton from American butcher counters happened later, and is often traced to the postwar generation's exposure to badly cooked mutton in military mess halls.