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Potato Soup
Boil a shank of beef two days before you want your soup, strain into a crock and let stand till you need it, the fat will rise to the top, this you must take off before beginning to make your soup, now take your soup pot, and in about two tablespoonfuls of this same fat, fry brown four large onions sliced, put in half your stock, have ready a pot of nicely mashed potatoes, stir the potatoes into the soup till about the thickness of thick cream, and season with pepper and salt. The remaining stock is valuable for graveys, &c., or Scotch broth instead of mutton.
A thrifty two-stage soup: a beef shank stock made in advance, then thickened with mashed potato rather than flour or cream. Most of the work is in the stock, and the only real technique is getting the potato in smoothly.
- Refrigerate the stockThe original strains the stock into a crock and lets it stand for two days under its own risen fat. Cover and refrigerate it instead; two days at modern room temperature is not safe for a meat broth.
- Shank of beefAsk for beef shin or hind shank cut crosswise, bone in. Two to three pounds simmered gently in about 3 quarts of water for 3 to 4 hours gives roughly 2 quarts of well-gelled stock. Skim the grey scum in the first twenty minutes and never let it boil hard, or it will cloud.
- Save the fat, but only someLift the solid fat disc off the cold stock and keep two tablespoons for frying the onions. The rest can be discarded; a shank yields far more than the recipe needs.
- Fry the onions properly"Fry brown" is the hinge of the dish. Four large sliced onions in beef fat over medium heat need 20 to 30 minutes to go genuinely brown and sweet. Rush this and the soup tastes only of potato.
- A crockAny deep glazed stoneware or glass container will do. What matters is depth, so the fat forms an unbroken layer over the top.
- Getting the potato in smoothlyStir the hot mashed potato into the simmering stock a spoonful at a time and whisk, or it will set in lumps. Do not use a food processor or blender on the potato at any point; it turns gluey. About 1.5 lb of potatoes, mashed with no milk or butter, thickens a quart of stock to "thick cream."
- Yield and servingHalf the stock plus the potato makes about 6 servings. It thickens further as it stands, so hold back a little stock to loosen it on reheating.
- The leftover stockThe Scotch broth mentioned at the end is the barley-and-root-vegetable soup usually made with mutton; this beef stock stands in for the mutton broth. The remaining quart also freezes well.
Potato soup thickened with cooked potato rather than cream belongs to a long British and Irish tradition of stretching a single cheap bone across several meals, and the structure here is as much household economy as cookery: one shank yields stock for soup, gravies, and a second soup entirely, plus dripping to fry with. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by Canadian housewives and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why so many of its entries read like practical instructions passed between neighbours rather than formal recipes. The habit of storing stock under its own fat cap in a crock was the standard method before domestic refrigeration, the sealed fat keeping air off the jelly beneath.