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Beef Broth, Anglaise
Cut in quarter-inch-square pieces one pound lean raw beef from the rump or flank, one medium carrot, one medium white turnip, one sound onion, two well-cleaned leeks, and three branches crisp white celery. Place all these in a large saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter, set on fire and gently brown for fifteen minutes, then add three and a half quarts water, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, one gill demi-glace one pound beef bones and one marrow bone. Season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Let slowly boil for forty minutes, then add three ounces well-washed and thoroughly drained barley, lightly mix and continually simmer for one hour and twenty-five minutes. Remove bones, skim fat from surface, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half teaspoon chopped chervil, boil for five minutes longer, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A long-simmered barley soup built on browned vegetables and diced raw beef rather than a pre-made stock. The instructions are sound; only the vocabulary and a couple of quantities need translating.
- "Set on fire"This means set the pan on the fire, i.e. over the heat — a literal translation of the French mettre sur le feu. Nothing is flambéed.
- A gill of demi-glaceA gill is half a cup. Demi-glace here is the classic reduced brown sauce; a half cup of good reduced beef stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate made up to strength, does the same job of giving the broth body and colour.
- The browning is the hingeFifteen minutes over moderate heat should leave the beef and vegetables genuinely coloured, with brown film on the pan bottom. Rushed or pale, the finished broth tastes thin and watery, and no amount of simmering later will fix it.
- Barley quantityThree ounces is a scant half cup of pearl barley. It will roughly triple in volume, so the soup thickens noticeably over the hour and twenty-five minutes; add water if it tightens past soup consistency.
- WorcestershireTwo tablespoons in three and a half quarts is assertive by modern palates. Start with one and taste at the end, when the barley has absorbed some of the seasoning.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for fourteen cups of liquid is light, on the assumption the demi-glace carries salt of its own. Season again after skimming rather than at the start.
- SkimmingSkim the grey scum during the first forty-minute boil as well as skimming fat at the end. Chilling the finished soup and lifting the solid fat gives a much cleaner result if you have time.
- ChervilStill hard to find fresh outside a garden. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gets close to its faintly aniseed note; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- YieldRoughly three quarts after reduction — eight to ten servings as a first course, five or six as a main with bread.
"Anglaise" in a French-trained kitchen means "in the English manner," and what marks this soup as English is the barley and the Worcestershire sauce rather than anything about the technique, which is entirely French: dice, sweat and brown a mirepoix with the meat, moisten, enrich with demi-glace, simmer, degrease, finish with fresh herbs. Barley broths of this type are old and widespread in Britain, where pearl barley was the everyday thickener for mutton and beef broths long before rice or pasta were common in home kitchens, and the marrow bone is there for the gelatine and richness it gives up over its long stay in the pot. Books like this one were compiled in the era when hotel cooking in America and Britain was staffed and organised on the French model, and the nationality in the title seems to point to the barley rather than to anything in the method.