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Soups
** No useless dish our table crowds; Harmoniously ranged and consonantly just, As in a concert instruments resound, Our ordered dishes in their courses chime."
The basis of all good soups, is the broth of meat.
This may be made by boiling the cracked joints of beef, veal or mutton, and is best when cooked the day before it is to be eaten. After putting the meat into the pot, cover it well with cold water and let it come to a boil, when it should be well skimmed. Set the pot where it will simmer slowly until it is thoroughly done, keeping the pot closely covered the while. The next day, when the soup is cold, remove the fat, which will harden on the top of the soup. After this, add the vegetables and the herbs you use for seasoning, cooking all well together. Before sending to the table, the soup should be strained. A good stock for soups may be made from shreds and bits of uncooked meat and bones, poultry and the remains of game. When these are all put together and stewed down in the pot, the French term it consomme, and use it chiefly in the preparation of brown soups. Soups may be varied in many ways, chiefly in the kinds of vegetables and different seasonings used, -as in herbs, burned caramel, eggs or slices of bread fried to a crisp in butter, which impart a savoury relish.
This is a method rather than a measured recipe: a general procedure for meat broth of the kind that opens most nineteenth-century soup chapters. A few points translate it into current practice.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: after the initial boil and skim the recipe calls for, keep it below a boil. "Simmer slowly" means bare movement at the surface, around 180-190F by a modern thermometer. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine protein into suspension, and no amount of straining will clear it afterwards.
- Cracked jointsAsk a butcher for beef or veal knuckle and marrow bones sawn open, plus a piece of shin or neck for flavour. The cracking exposes marrow and cartilage; whole uncut bones give a thin result. The recipe gives no quantities; a workable modern starting point is about 4 lb bones and meat to 4 quarts cold water.
- Cold water and skimmingStarting cold is deliberate: proteins rise slowly as a grey scum that can be lifted off. Skim repeatedly during the first twenty minutes, before the liquid gets hot enough to break the scum up.
- Overnight coolingThe recipe assumes the pot simply stands until the next day. Cool it quickly in a sink of ice water instead, then refrigerate. The fat cap still lifts off cleanly the next morning.
- Vegetables go in lateThe instruction to add vegetables on the second day is sound. Onion, carrot, celery, leek, a bay leaf and parsley stems need 45 minutes to an hour at most; longer and they turn muddy and sweetish.
- ConsommeThe book uses the word loosely for any stock made from scraps and bones. In French practice consomme means a stock clarified with egg white and lean minced meat until it is brilliantly clear. What is described here is simply a brown stock.
- Burned caramelSugar cooked to a dark, bitter caramel and thinned with water, used as a colouring for brown soups. Modern gravy browning is the same idea; more often now the bones and vegetables are roasted first for colour.
- Salt and yieldNo salt is specified, and that is correct for a stock meant to be reduced. Season the finished soup, not the broth. Working from the suggested 4 quarts of water over 4 lb of bones, expect roughly 2.5 to 3 quarts of strained stock; refrigerated it is best used within three or four days, or frozen for several months.
The verse at the head is conventionally attributed to William King's early eighteenth-century The Art of Cookery, a mock-Horatian poem that Victorian compilers were fond of quoting to lend the kitchen a little classical dignity. The Home Cook Book was published in Toronto in 1877, assembled from contributions by local women and sold for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it opens with soup because soup was where the household economy showed. A stockpot that turned cracked bones, poultry carcasses and "the remains of game" into the base of a week's dinners was the practical answer to a kitchen with no refrigeration and no supermarket. The French vocabulary sprinkled through the passage reflects the period's assumption that serious cookery was French cookery, even when the technique described is plain English boiled broth.