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Beetroot Broth
Peel and boil for fifteen minutes four medium, sound red beets, drain, slice very finely and place in a saucepan with two pounds chopped shin of beef, one sliced carrot, one ditto onion, two ditto leeks, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, two bay leaves and two cloves; pour into the pan three quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, mix well and let slowly come to a boil, mixing once in a while, then keep pan simmering two hours; remove, strain the broth through a double cheesecloth into six cups and serve either hot or cold.
A clear beet-and-beef broth rather than a thick borscht — everything is strained out at the end, so the vegetables are flavouring, not filling. Two details decide whether it works: keeping the pot at a bare simmer, and accepting that the colour will fade.
- Colour is the hingeBetanin, the pigment in red beets, breaks down with prolonged heat and turns brownish. Two hours of simmering will give a tawny broth rather than a ruby one; a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of vinegar added near the end helps hold much of the red, and traditional clear barszcz is nearly always acidulated, which has the same effect.
- Shin of beefAsk for beef shin cut across the bone, or bone-in shank. It is the right cut here — collagen-rich, so it gives body — but ask the butcher to saw it into two-inch lengths so it fits and extracts properly. Boneless stew beef will make a thinner broth.
- Bare simmer, and skim"Slowly come to a boil" then "keep pan simmering" means surface tremble only, around 185F. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and albumin into the liquid and you will not get it clear again, however fine the cheesecloth. Skim the grey scum off in the first fifteen minutes.
- Two hours is on the short sideShin at a true simmer usually wants two and a half to three hours to give up its gelatine and go tender. Taste the broth at two hours; if it is thin, keep going.
- Chervil and leeksChervil is sold fresh in some markets and is worth seeking, but a small sprig of tarragon plus extra parsley approximates its aniseed-parsley note. "Two ditto leeks" means two sliced leeks; use the white and pale green, and wash the grit out from between the layers.
- StrainingLine a sieve with two layers of cheesecloth wrung out in cold water and ladle rather than pour, leaving the sediment behind in the pot. Chill and lift the set fat off the top if you want it clean.
- Yield and servingThe recipe strains the broth into six cups, so six servings as a first course. Served cold it will often set to a light jelly from the shin — that is correct, not a fault. The strained beef is worth eating separately with mustard and coarse salt.
Clear beet broth of this kind belongs to the family of soups English speakers know as borscht: Polish barszcz czysty and Ukrainian and Russian equivalents, drunk from a cup rather than eaten with a spoon, and still served that way at Christmas Eve supper in Poland. The ancestral soup, though, was the fermented sour one, and this version has no souring at all. The name is generally traced to a Slavic word for hogweed, which was fermented for sour soup long before beets took over the job in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is striking about this version is how thoroughly it has been put through a professional kitchen: the beets are parboiled, the aromatics are a standard French bundle of carrot, onion, leek, parsley, bay and clove, and the whole thing is strained through doubled cheesecloth into cups as a consomm he the the American hotel and restaurant trade around 1900, where a "foreign" soup was routinely rebuilt on the framework of the stockpot ransla a book called The International Cook Book existed to perform.