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Rice Soup, Smyrna
Place in a saucepan a very small knuckle of veal and one pound of shin of beef with four quarts water, season with a teaspoon salt, let come to a boil, then skim the scum from the surface, add a carrot cut in quarters, an onion with two cloves stuck in it, one turnip, two leeks, two branches celery and one branch parsley. Tie in a thin piece of cloth a sprig of thyme, one bay leaf and blade of mace, and add to the soup, cover the pan and let slowly boil for two hours and a half, skimming off the fat once in a while. Strain the broth through cheesecloth into another saucepan. Dilute a saltspoon Spanish saffron in a tablespoon water, strain and add to the soup, add three ounces raw rice, with half teaspoon chopped parsley and the leaves from two branches chervil, then boil for twenty-five minutes. Pick stems from two ounces Smyrna or California seeded raisins and add to the soup, boil for ten minutes more, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear veal-and-beef broth finished with saffron, rice and raisins. The stock work is straightforward; the finish is where the proportions need attention.
- Saffron quantityA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of saffron by modern buying habits and will dominate the broth. A generous pinch, perhaps 20-30 threads, steeped in a tablespoon of warm water gives the colour and scent the dish wants.
- Boil means simmer"Let slowly boil for two hours and a half" is a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A real boil emulsifies the fat and renders the broth cloudy, which defeats the point of straining it through cheesecloth.
- The veal knuckleA veal knuckle is the joint end of the leg; butchers often sell it as veal soup bones, and a cut of shank such as osso buco will do in its place. It is there for gelatine rather than meat, and the recipe asks only for a "very small" one alongside the pound of shin of beef.
- Blade of maceMace blades are the dried aril of the nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace tied into the bundle with the thyme and bay is a reasonable stand-in.
- Rice timingThree ounces is a scant half cup of raw long-grain rice. Twenty-five minutes at a simmer is longer than most modern rice needs; check at fifteen and remember the grains keep swelling in the hot broth in the tureen.
- ChervilChervil is rarely stocked and goes limp fast. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves approximates its faint anise note; simply doubling the parsley is the honest fallback.
- Fat and yieldChill the strained broth if time allows and lift the solid fat off, which is cleaner than skimming hot. Four quarts of water will reduce to roughly three, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Smyrna is the old name for İzmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey, and through the nineteenth century it was the port through which the eastern Mediterranean's dried fruit reached Europe and America — "Smyrna raisins" and "Smyrna figs" were trade grades as much as places of origin. The recipe offers California raisins as the alternative, a sign of the growing American trade. The dish itself belongs to a broad Ottoman and Persian habit of sweetening savoury broths with dried fruit and colouring them with saffron, a habit medieval European cooks shared and largely abandoned. The heavy French scaffolding here — the bouquet tied in cloth, the onion stuck with cloves, the long veal stock strained through cheesecloth — sits oddly on a borrowed idea.