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Lamb Broth with Barley
Cut in small square pieces one pound raw lean lamb from leg or shoulder, two medium carrots, one sound turnip, two leeks, three branches celery, one medium onion, place in a saucepan with one and a half table-spoons melted butter and nicely brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts water, add two pounds lamb or beef bones, season with a level tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, three tablespoons Worcestershire sauce. Add three ounces well washed and drained barley, cover pan, let simmer one and a half hours, remove bones from soup, skim fat off surface, add two gills tomato sauce, a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, boil ten minutes, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A straightforward barley broth written in the run-on professional style of its day. Nothing here is unsafe, but several measures need translating and two seasonings are heavier than modern palates expect.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. Add it at the end as directed; by that point the barley has already had its hour and a half, and acid added earlier is often said to hold grains back from softening.
- Tomato sauce, 1900s senseThis means a plain cooked tomato sauce — tomatoes simmered with a little onion and butter, or passata reduced slightly — not ketchup and not a herbed Italian pasta sauce. Canned tomato puree thinned with a little of the broth works.
- Barley by weightThree ounces of pearl barley is a scant half cup. It will roughly triple, and the soup thickens noticeably as it sits; thin with hot water or stock when reheating.
- Salt and pepperA level tablespoon of salt in three quarts is about right for a broth that will reduce, but the bones and the Worcestershire also add salt. Start with two teaspoons and correct at the end. Half a teaspoon of white pepper is assertive; it is meant to be.
- WorcestershireThree tablespoons is a lot by current taste and will dominate. One tablespoon at the start and more to taste at the end gives the same savoury depth without the sharp anchovy edge.
- The browning stepTen minutes over moderate heat with the butter is the flavour base of the whole soup. Get real colour on the lamb and vegetables and do not crowd the pan — a wide heavy pot beats a tall stockpot here.
- Fat and skimmingLamb fat congeals unpleasantly. Skim as instructed, and if you have time, chill the finished broth and lift the solid fat off before the final ten-minute boil with the tomato sauce and parsley.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the sauce gives roughly two and a half quarts finished — eight generous bowls, or ten as a first course.
Barley broth is a long-established form of soup in the British kitchen, and lamb or mutton with barley and root vegetables is essentially a version of what Scottish cookery books call Scotch broth — barley, it is often said, being the grain that grew where wheat would not. What suggests this version belongs to hotel rather than farmhouse cooking is the browning of the meat and vegetables in butter first, the two pounds of bones added purely for body, and the finish with tomato sauce and Worcestershire: what looks like a habit of layering commercial seasonings onto a peasant framework to give it colour and a savoury edge, though this is inference from the recipe itself rather than established fact. The single-paragraph instruction with no separate ingredient list was a common style of the period, written for cooks who already knew the sequence and needed only the quantities.