Scotch Broth
3 pounds mutton from the neck 2 quarts cold water. 2 tablespoons salt 1 sliced carrot 2 sliced onions 4 stalks celery 4 tablespoons barley, soaked overnight Remove the skin and fat from meat that has been wiped with a damp cloth. Cut the meat into small pieces, put into the kettle and add the water. Heat gradually to boiling point, skim and cook about 2 hours, adding vegetables at the end of the first hour. Strain, cool and remove any fat. Reheat to boiling point, add barley and cook until the barley is soft. The meat should not be thrown away, but used in stews, croquettes, or meat cakes. If combined with a little broth, the flavor is restored.
The ingredient list as printed has been mangled: the meat and the water have drifted to the wrong places, and the split peas appear at the end with no instruction attached. What follows fills the gaps and puts the method in working order.
- The missing meatScotch broth in books of this period is built on 2–3 lb of mutton or lamb neck, shoulder or shank, bone in. Lamb shoulder chops or neck slices are the closest supermarket equivalent; the bone matters more than the cut.
- The waterThe recipe tells you to 'add the water' but the quantity is missing from the ingredient list. Around 3 quarts is the right order of magnitude for this much meat and vegetable; note that the '3 quarts cold water' printed at the very end may in fact be the head of the next recipe rather than a stray line from this one. Whatever the amount, start the meat in cold water: it draws out the proteins that rise as scum, which is why the recipe tells you to heat gradually and skim.
- The split peasA cup of dried split peas is printed after the end of the method, with no instruction attached. It may be a displaced ingredient for this broth, but it is at least as likely to be the first line of the next recipe; period Scotch broth sometimes carries dried peas alongside the barley, sometimes not. If you do use them, add them with the barley at the reheating stage: modern split peas need no soaking and collapse in about 45 minutes, roughly the same time as pearl barley that has been soaked overnight as directed.
- SaltTwo tablespoons for 3 quarts is heavy by current taste, and it concentrates as the broth reduces. Add half at the outset and correct at the end, after the peas have gone soft.
- Cooling and skimmingThe instruction to strain, cool and lift the fat is the easiest step to get wrong. Chill the strained broth uncovered in a shallow pan until cold, then refrigerate; the fat sets into a cap you can lift off whole. Do not leave a stockpot standing at room temperature for hours to cool.
- TimingTwo hours suits neck and shoulder. Shanks want closer to three, and the barley and peas should go in only after straining, or they cloud the broth and stick to the bottom.
- The reserved meatThe advice to save the boiled meat is sound and worth following. Pull it from the bones while warm, moisten with a ladle of broth, and it will make croquettes or a shepherd's pie; strained-out meat left dry turns to string.
- YieldIf you take the liquid as roughly 3 quarts, expect something over two quarts of finished broth after skimming and evaporation, or six to eight servings as a first course. The recipe itself states no yield.
Scotch broth is a mutton-and-barley soup that recurs in British and American cookbooks over a long stretch, often with broadly similar elements: bone-in sheep meat, pearl barley, and root vegetables. Barley was the everyday grain of Scotland long before wheat became affordable there, and its starch is what gives the broth its characteristic cloudy body rather than any flour or roux. The version here, with its instruction to save the boiled meat for stews and croquettes, belongs to the thrift-minded tradition of early twentieth-century American booklets — the Metropolitan Cook Book was distributed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to its policyholders, part of a wider campaign in which insurers issued health and household advice on the theory that better-fed families lived longer. That commercial origin may well account for the tone: nothing is wasted, the vegetables are cheap, and one pot of meat is meant to feed a household twice.