Home › The World's Kitchen › Veal Broth with Rice
Veal Broth with Rice
Cut a pound of lean raw veal into quarter-inch-square pieces, place in a saucepan with tablespoon butter and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring lightly meanwhile. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, add two pounds of shin or knuckle of veal, season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Finely slice two leeks, chop two medium-sized white onions, and add to the soup, cover pan and slowly simmer for one hour. Chop finely a bean sound garlic, four branches parsley, two branches chervil, and add to the soup with four ounces raw rice. Cover pan and gently boil for forty minutes more, lift up the shin of veal, skim fat from surface, transfer the soup to a tureen and serve.
A straightforward long-simmered veal soup, but two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: the rice timing and the cut of meat.
- Add the rice laterForty minutes of boiling reduces most rice to paste and clouds the broth. Long-grain white rice needs 18-20 minutes in simmering stock; give the soup its extra forty minutes of simmering first and add the rice for the last twenty.
- "A bean sound garlic"This means a sound (unblemished) piece of garlic about the size of a bean, roughly one small clove. It is a seasoning note, not a flavour base.
- The veal cuts"Shin" is the shank, sold now cross-cut as osso buco or as a whole veal shank, bone in; "knuckle" is the joint end of the same leg. Either way the bone is doing the work here, supplying the gelatin that gives the broth body. Ask the butcher to cut it into two or three pieces so it fits the pan.
- Simmering timeCounting the forty minutes with the rice, the shank actually gets about an hour and forty minutes, which is enough for a full-bodied broth and meat that pulls away from the bone. If your piece is thick, hold it at a bare simmer nearer two hours; the diced veal will be soft either way.
- Skim early as well as lateThe recipe skims only at the end. Skim the grey scum that rises in the first ten minutes after the water comes up to heat, or it will break up and dull the broth.
- ChervilChervil is seasonal and rarely stocked. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon approximates its faintly aniseed note; a little extra parsley alone is acceptable.
- SaltA level tablespoon in three and a half quarts is about right for a broth that will reduce, but salt again at the end after the liquid has cooked down.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of water yields roughly ten to twelve cups after simmering, enough for eight to ten as a first course. The lifted shank meat can be shredded back into the tureen or served separately.
Veal was the backbone of professional stock-making in the era this book comes from: mild in flavour, generous in gelatin, and cheap enough in the bone-in cuts that a kitchen could keep a pot going all day. A broth like this sits between the clear consomm he frthe frankly filling rice and vegetable soups of domestic cooking, which is why the rice and the leeks appear at all: they turn a stock into a course. The leek-and-onion base with parsley and chervil is standard French practice of the time, and chervil's near-disappearance from English-speaking kitchens is itself a fair marker of how much herb-buying has narrowed since. Recipes of this shape were presumably written for cooks who understood that the meat and bones were only lending their substance to the liquid, and that the lifted shank was a second dish, not waste.