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Veal Soup
To about three pounds of a joint of veal, which must be well broken up, put four quarts of water and set it over to boil. Prepare one-fourth pound of macaroni by boiling it by itself, with sufficient water to cover it; add a little butter to the macaroni when it is tender; strain the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper; then add the macaroni in the water in which it is boiled. The addition of a pint of rich milk or cream and celery flavour is relished by many.
A plain veal-bone broth finished with macaroni, of the type that assumes a stockpot on the range all afternoon. The bones do the work; the recipe's silence on timing is the main thing to fix.
- Simmer timeThe original never says how long. Three pounds of well-broken veal joint in four quarts of water needs three to four hours at a bare simmer to draw out gelatine and flavour. Boiling hard clouds the broth and emulsifies the fat into it.
- "Well broken up"This means the bones cracked or sawn so the marrow and collagen are exposed. Ask a butcher for veal knuckle or shank sawn into two-inch pieces; whole joints give a thin result.
- YieldFour quarts reduces to roughly two and a half to three quarts over a long simmer, serving six to eight as a first course.
- Skim, then strainSkim the grey scum in the first twenty minutes, then again once the pot has settled. Chilling the strained broth overnight lets you lift the fat off in a sheet, which is easier than skimming hot.
- The macaroni waterThe recipe adds the pasta together with its cooking water, and the starch gives the thin broth a little body. If you find it cloudy, drain the macaroni and accept a clearer, lighter soup.
- Macaroni of the periodA quarter pound of nineteenth-century macaroni generally meant long hollow tubes, snapped into short lengths, and period recipes often boiled it longer than modern dried pasta needs. Use any short tube and cook it just to tender, since it will sit in hot broth afterwards.
- "Celery flavour"This most likely means celery seed or an infusion of celery leaves and stalk; prepared celery flavourings and celery salt became common commercial articles later in the century. A few celery ribs simmered in the broth for the last hour does the same job.
- The cream finishAdd the pint of milk or cream off the boil and warm it through only. Held at a simmer with salt and starchy pasta water, dairy will catch on the pan bottom and can break.
Veal soup of this kind was a mainstay of the nineteenth-century domestic stockpot: veal bones give a great deal of gelatine and very little assertive flavour, which is exactly what a cook wanted as a neutral base for whatever was to hand. Its reputation as an invalid's dish came from the same quality, being thought light and restorative, and cookbooks of the period commonly list veal broth among dishes for the sick as well as among family dinners. The macaroni is the tell of the period. Italian pasta was available in American cities by the later nineteenth century, and it turns up in soups long before it was understood as part of an Italian meal, treated simply as another farinaceous thickener alongside barley, rice and sago. The alternative finish with cream and celery flavouring reflects the taste of the day for white soups, an older English category that ran from almond-thickened medieval potages to the cream and veal purees of Victorian dinner tables.