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Mutton Broth
3 pounds lamb, cut from forequarter. 3 pints cold water 2 tablespoons boiled rice or barley 1 teaspoon salt Wipe meat, remove from bones, discard skin and fat, and cut lean meat in small pieces. 'Put meat and bones in kettle, add water, heat gradually to boiling point, skim and cook slowly until meat is tender. Add salt when half cooked. Strain, remove fat, reheat and add cooked rice.
A plain invalid-cookery broth: lean meat and bones drawn slowly in cold water, defatted, and finished with a little cooked grain. Most of the work is in the skimming.
- The missing quantityAs printed here the ingredient list begins mid-stream — the amount of mutton has dropped out. For 3 pints of cold water something in the order of one to two pounds of scrag end or neck, bones included, would be usual, but the exact figure cannot be recovered from the page.
- Cold water, slow heatThis is the hinge. Starting in cold water and raising the temperature gradually draws soluble protein and flavour out of the meat, and it brings the scum up in a coherent raft you can lift off. A hard boil at any stage emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth.
- "Cook slowly"Means a bare shiver at the surface rather than a boil; the book gives neither temperature nor time, but expect something like 1½ to 2 hours until the meat shreds. Mutton needs longer than lamb; if you are using lamb neck, check at an hour.
- Salt at the halfway markThe recipe specifies salt when the meat is half cooked but gives no reason for it. A teaspoon in 3 pints is mild by modern taste and can be adjusted after straining.
- Removing the fatMutton fat sets hard and waxy. Chilling the strained broth and lifting the disc off the top is far more thorough than skimming hot, and the broth reheats without any loss.
- Rice or barleyBoth go in already cooked so they do not cloud the liquid with starch or swell into porridge on standing. Pearl barley is the older choice and wants about 40 minutes on its own beforehand.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; allow for some loss to evaporation, skimming and straining from the 3 pints of water started with.
Invalid cookery was a standing section in American and British household manuals well into the twentieth century, on the assumption that the sickroom tray was the housekeeper's job and that convalescents needed food that was nourishing, bland and easily swallowed. Mutton broth was one of its fixtures, alongside beef tea, gruel and barley water, and the whole approach rests on a nineteenth-century belief that the goodness of meat could be extracted into a liquid the stomach need not work at. Mutton — the meat of a sheep over a year old, once ordinary and now hard to buy outside halal and specialist butchers — was cheap and strongly flavoured. The insistence on discarding skin and fat and skimming again after chilling may reflect an assumption that fat was the part a sick person could not manage.