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Grecian Mutton Broth
Cut a pound lean raw mutton in small squares, place in a saucepan, add two seeded, chopped green peppers, two chopped onions and three chopped leeks, pour in one and one-half tablespoons melted butter, Set pan on a fire and lightly brown ten minutes. Moisten with two quarts broth and one quart water. Season with teaspoon salt. Tie in a bunch a branch fresh mint, two branches chervil and one branch parsley, add to soup, then boil forty minutes, add three ounces raw rice and boil thirty minutes longer. Add one ounce peeled almonds cut in half, one ounce well-picked Corinth raisins and two gills tomato sauce, then boil ten minutes more. Lift up bouquet, skim fat from surface, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A three-quart soup built on browned mutton, herbs, rice and a sweet-savory finish of almonds and currants. Two things need attention: the rice, which is cooked far past collapse as written, and the meat, which is cut small enough that it will not become tender in the time given.
- Rice timingThe rice goes in and boils forty minutes in total. That is long past done for any modern rice, long or short grain; it will dissolve and thicken the broth into porridge. Fifteen to eighteen minutes of simmering before the almonds and raisins go in gives grains that hold together, and the final ten minutes finishes it.
- The muttonSmall cubes of lean mutton get eighty minutes of simmering in total (forty minutes before the rice, then thirty, then ten), which will still leave them firm and dry rather than tender. Either simmer the meat in the broth for an hour and a half before the rice, or accept chewier meat. Lamb shoulder is the closest thing most butchers now carry; true mutton, from an animal over two years, is rare outside specialist suppliers and halal butchers.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. The 1906 sense of tomato sauce is a cooked, seasoned tomato purée rather than pasta sauce; canned tomato purée or passata thinned slightly is the right substitute.
- Corinth raisinsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisins from Corinth that give the word "currant." One ounce is about three tablespoons. Ordinary raisins work but are sweeter and coarser.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and it wilts in a day. Its flavour sits between parsley and anise; a little extra parsley plus a few fennel fronds or tarragon leaves covers the gap. Keep the mint generous, since it carries the dish.
- The bouquetTie the mint, chervil and parsley with kitchen string and leave a tail long enough to hook over the pan handle. Herbs simmered eighty minutes loose in the pot leave stems and blackened leaves throughout the soup.
- Heat and skimming"Boil" here means a steady simmer; a real rolling boil will shred the meat surface and cloud the broth. Skim the fat at the end as directed, or chill the soup and lift the cap off.
- SaltOne teaspoon salt assumes unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, hold the salt until the rice is in and taste then.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid before reduction, so eight to ten servings as a first course. It thickens considerably overnight and will need thinning with broth when reheated.
The International Cook Book belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century professional compilations that organised the world's cooking into national labels, and "Grecian" here signals a flavour set rather than a documented Athenian recipe: mint, leeks, rice, almonds and currants together point to the wider eastern Mediterranean and Ottoman kitchen, where dried fruit and nuts in savoury dishes had been ordinary for centuries and struck Western readers as exotic. Rice-thickened meat soups finished with herbs are common across Greece and Anatolia, though the best-known Greek versions bind with egg and lemon rather than tomato. The tomato sauce and the ten-minute preliminary browning in butter belong to a French professional idiom rather than to anything specifically Greek.