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March 5
Menu: Scotch Broth; Browned Veal Knuckle; Riced Potatoes Buttered Parsnips; Olive and Lettuce Salad; Cheese Straws; Apricot Parfait; Coffee Scotch Broth-2 pounds neck mutton, 1 cup barley, 1 cup peas, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 1 teaspoon sugar, 3 onions or leeks, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 small cabbage, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 16 cups water or stock, salt and pepper to taste. Prepare vegetables and cut them into small pieces. Put water or stock into large earthenware pan, and when it boils, add meat and barley. Boil up, skimming frequently, add vegetables, and then simmer for 3 hours. Now stir in one extra carrot grated, salt and pepper, sugar and Crisco. Simmer again for 30 minutes. Add parsley and broth is ready to serve.
A full gallon of broth from the 1912 Crisco cookbook's day-by-day dinner calendar, built on the cheapest cut on the sheep. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient list assumes knowledge the book did not bother to spell out.
- The peas are driedThe peas are probably dried -- in a winter broth of this date "1 cup peas" most likely means dried split peas rather than garden peas. The recipe adds them with the vegetables, and they dissolve into the body of the soup; fresh or frozen peas added that early would disintegrate to nothing.
- Neck muttonMutton is sheep over about two years old, stronger and fattier than lamb and rarely sold in supermarkets. Two pounds of bone-in lamb neck or shoulder chops is the usual substitute, and the bones matter — they are what makes the broth.
- BarleyPearl barley is intended. One cup in 16 cups of liquid thickens considerably over three and a half hours, and the broth will thicken further as it stands; expect to loosen it with stock when reheating.
- The earthenware panA glazed earthen stockpot set over low heat, prized because it held temperature evenly. Any heavy-bottomed stockpot of 6 quarts or more does the same job.
- Skim early and properlyThe instruction to skim frequently at the boil is the one step that decides whether the broth is clear or grey and muddy. Grey scum rises in the first ten minutes; take it off before the vegetables go in and cloud the surface.
- The cabbageThree and a half hours reduces a small cabbage to threads and pushes a sulphurous note through the whole pot. Modern practice is to shred it and add it in the last twenty minutes, with the grated carrot.
- Why grated carrot at the endThe late carrot is for colour and sweetness, not texture — the first carrot has by then given up everything it had. The teaspoon of sugar does the same work, and both can be cut if your stock is already sweet.
- The tablespoon of CriscoStirred in at the end, it is standing in for the fat a leaner cut fails to give up, and it is there because this is a Crisco advertising cookbook. Lamb neck renders plenty of its own fat; taste before adding anything.
- YieldRoughly a gallon, or eight to ten bowls as a main course. Skimming the solidified fat off the top after overnight chilling improves it.
Scotch broth is the standing example of a one-pot dish designed around barley, root vegetables and a cheap joint of sheep — the ingredients a Scottish household could count on through winter — and it appears in English and American cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century with only small variations. Its presence here, dated March 6, comes from the "Calendar of Dinners" menu section of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbook, published in the early 1910s (The Story of Crisco, by Marion Harris Neil, is dated 1913), a year of menus meant to persuade cooks that their new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening belonged in every dish, savoury included. The single tablespoon of Crisco stirred into a gallon of mutton broth near the end is not cookery so much as marketing: the fat contributes almost nothing to a pot already enriched by neck bones, but the brand name had to appear in the ingredient list. The recipe is otherwise a plain, competent version of a dish much older than the book.