Veal Soup
To about three pounds of a well-broken joint of veal, add four quarts water, and set it over to boil; prepare one-fourth pound macaroni by boiling it in a dish by itself with enough water to cover it; add a little butter when the macaroni is tender, strain the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper, then add the macaroni with the water in which it was boiled; onions or celery may be added for flavoring. - Mrs. R. M. Nixon, New Castle,
A plain broth-and-macaroni soup of the kind that carried a knuckle of veal a long way. The recipe assumes hours of unattended simmering and gives no times at all.
- The joint"A well-broken joint of veal" most likely means a veal knuckle or shank sawn through so the marrow and collagen can escape, though "joint" was also used loosely for any bone-in cut. Ask a butcher to cut a 3 lb shank into two or three pieces; the gelatin it yields is what gives this soup its body.
- Timing the stockFour quarts of water on 3 lb of bone wants a bare simmer for 3 to 4 hours, skimmed for the first twenty minutes. It should reduce by roughly a third and set to a soft jelly when cold.
- Never let it boil hardThe recipe says only "set it over to boil," but veal bones give a delicate, pale broth, and a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds it. Keep it at the point where bubbles break only occasionally.
- Macaroni cooked separatelyThe recipe has you boil it in its own dish and then add both pasta and its water, which will lightly thicken the finished soup. Period macaroni was generally sold in long tubes to be broken by hand; 4 oz of dried elbows is the equivalent weight.
- Season only at the endSalt goes in after straining, once the volume has settled. Salting a stock that will lose a third of its water risks an over-salted soup.
- The aromaticsOnion and celery are offered as optional; add them whole or in large pieces for the last hour and lift them out at straining, as long cooking will soften them into the broth.
- The meatThe recipe says nothing about it, but there will be a useful amount of meat on the shank. Pick it off, shred it, and return it with the macaroni rather than discarding it with the bones.
- YieldAbout six to eight bowls as a first course. It keeps three days refrigerated, though the macaroni will soften; cook the pasta fresh if you plan on leftovers.
Veal soup is the workhorse of nineteenth-century American cookery books, and it turns up in the soup chapter of a great many of them because a veal knuckle was cheap, nearly meatless, and full of the gelatin that gave broth its body at a time when commercial meat extracts were only beginning to be available. The Dixie Cook Book, like its parent volume the Buckeye Cookery family of compilations, gathered its recipes by contribution and printed the name and town of each contributor, which is why Mrs. R. M. Nixon of New Castle stands at the foot of this one. The macaroni marks it as a slightly genteel version: dried Italian pasta was imported and later domestically made through the century, and adding it to a clear veal broth may well have been a way to signal a soup a little grander than plain bouillon without spending more on meat.