Barley Soup
To seven cupfuls of beef, mutton, or mixed soupstock, add one cupful of well cooked barley. Simmer five minutes and serve.
A two-line recipe that assumes two things the modern cook may not have on hand: a pot of homemade stock and a bowl of leftover cooked barley.
- QuantitiesSeven cupfuls of stock to one of barley is a little under 2 quarts of liquid; the recipe gives no yield, but the volume would serve roughly six as a first course. The proportion is thin — this is a broth with grain in it, not a thick porridge.
- Cooked barleyPearl barley takes roughly 30-45 minutes at a simmer in salted water and about triples in volume, so about 1/3 cup dry yields the cupful called for. Hulled barley needs an hour or more. The recipe assumes the barley is already cooked, separately from the soup.
- SoupstockBeef or mutton stock here means a long-simmered bone broth. Commercial low-sodium beef broth stands in, though it will taste flatter; season at the end, since the recipe itself calls for no seasoning.
- MuttonMutton is sheep over two years old and is rarely sold in the United States now. Lamb bones give the nearest flavour, milder and less tallowy.
- The five minutesThat short simmer is only to heat the barley through and let it give a little body to the broth. Longer will not hurt it, but the grain eventually goes soft and the soup turns cloudy.
- What it needsAs written the soup is unseasoned. Salt, pepper and a little parsley at the end are the obvious additions.
Barley is often said to be the oldest of the European soup grains, cheap, filling and long-keeping, and broths thickened with it appear in English and Scottish cookery for centuries before this book — Scotch broth, made with mutton and barley, is the best-known survivor. Its presence here, reduced to a single sentence, says a good deal about how turn-of-the-century American cookbooks were organised. The recipe is not really a recipe for soup so much as a note on how to use up cooked grain, which is why it gives no seasonings, no timing for the barley and no yield.