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Beef Soup (Boil the bone for two or three)
Boil the bone for two or three hours, then remove and to two quarts of the liquid add one grated raw potato, one grated onion, one-half teacupful of tomato; one tablespoonful of rice; a leaf of cabbage and one-half of a small white turnip, both finely chopped. Allow the vegetables an hour and a half or two hours to cook. Season with salt and pepper to taste, before adding the vegetables.
A frugal stockpot soup built on a beef bone and whatever root vegetables were on hand. The method is sound; only the vegetable timing needs rethinking.
- The boneTwo to three hours of plain boiling gives a thin broth. Roast a 2-3 lb beef marrow or shin bone at 425F for 30-40 minutes first, then simmer — never boil hard — for a much deeper result. Skim the grey scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Two quarts of liquidYou will need to start with about three quarts of water to finish with two after simmering, or top up as it reduces.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is generally reckoned smaller than the 8 oz measuring cup, often around 6 oz, though the measure was never standardised. On that reading, half a teacupful is roughly 6 tablespoons of tomato; canned crushed tomato is a fair stand-in, whether the original cook used home-put-up or shop-bought fruit.
- Grated potato and onionThese are the thickener. Grated raw potato releases starch straight into the broth, which is the point; do not rinse it. Grate on the coarse side of a box grater directly into the pot.
- Vegetable timingAn hour and a half will reduce the cabbage and turnip to nothing and the rice to paste. Twenty-five to thirty minutes at a bare simmer is enough for everything here.
- Season before the vegetablesThe instruction is deliberate and worth keeping: salt the broth while it is still clear, so you can taste what you are actually seasoning. Check again at the end, since reduction concentrates it.
- YieldTwo quarts of finished soup serves six as a first course, four as a light supper with bread.
This is a soup written for a household that bought meat on the bone and expected the bone to work twice — once for the roast or boiled dinner, once for the pot. The grated raw potato is the tell: starch grated straight from a tuber was the cheapest available body for a thin stock. American cookbooks are full of these "second day" soups, and the single cabbage leaf and half turnip show the scale of thrift involved — not a recipe so much as a formula for using up what the larder held. Tomato appears here in the small, flavoring quantity typical of such soups, where it was treated as a seasoning acid rather than a base.