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Mother's Vegetable Soup
Wipe a four-pound shin of beef, cut the meat into small pieces and place in a soup kettle with the bone, which should be sawed into several pieces. Cover with five quarts of cold water, and after standing for an hour in a cool room place on the fire and heat slowly to the simmering point. Simmer (not boil) slowly for four hours, add one teaspoonful of salt, then strain and set aside until next day. Remove all fat from the stock, return the latter to the clean kettle and heat to the boiling point. Pare and cut into half inch dice one white turnip, one potato, one large carrot, one medium-sized onion, one sweet potato, one cupful of corn, shell sufficient green peas to measure one cupful, skin and cut fine one tomato, wash and drain one and one-half tablespoonfuls of rice. To the boiling soup add the prepared rice, turnip, sweet potato and carrot and simmer for forty minutes, then add the remaining vegetables and cook for twenty minutes longer; season with salt and pepper one-half hour before the soup is done and when turned into tureen sprinkle one teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley over all.
A two-day household soup: a long, gentle beef stock on the first day, vegetables added on the second. Nothing here is difficult, but the results depend almost entirely on temperature control during the first stage.
- Never let the stock boilThis is the hinge. A shin simmered at a bare tremble for four hours gives a clear, clean-tasting broth; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and collagen and turns it cloudy and greasy. Aim for the surface barely shivering, around 180-190F, and skim the grey scum in the first half hour.
- Shin of beefThe shank, sold today as beef shank or soup bones. Ask the butcher to saw the bone into two- or three-inch lengths so the marrow and gelatin can escape; a whole bone in a home kettle gives up very little. Four pounds is bone-in weight.
- The cold-water startCovering with cold water and letting it stand an hour before heating is deliberate, not idleness. It draws soluble protein out of the meat, which then coagulates as scum and is skimmed off, leaving a clearer stock.
- Chilling overnightThe original assumes a cold larder. Cool the strained stock quickly, in a shallow pan or an ice bath, and refrigerate it rather than leaving it out at room temperature. The fat will lift off the next day as a solid cap.
- Quantities and pot sizeFive quarts of water needs a stockpot of at least eight quarts. After four hours of simmering and skimming you will have roughly three and a half to four quarts of stock, which with the vegetables serves ten to twelve as a first course.
- One cupful of corn and of peasFresh, in the season this book was written for: about two ears of corn cut from the cob, and roughly a pound of peas in the pod. Frozen corn and peas work, but add them in the last five minutes rather than with the second batch of vegetables, or they will collapse.
- The riceA tablespoon and a half of raw rice into roughly four quarts of liquid is a thickener and a texture, not a starch course. The recipe puts it in with the first group, so it cooks a full hour and modern white rice will be very soft; if you want it distinct, add it with the second group.
- Seasoning timingThe vegetable stage runs sixty minutes in total, so seasoning "half an hour before the soup is done" falls ten minutes before the second batch of vegetables goes in. Season then and correct again at the end; the stock itself carries only one teaspoonful of salt, which is well under modern taste for this volume.
- Skinning the tomatoDrop it in boiling water for fifteen seconds and the skin slips off. Loose tomato skins curl into unpleasant strips in a clear soup, which is the whole reason the step is specified.
This is the standard American household soup of the period rendered in its most patient form: a bone stock made one day, defatted the next, and finished with whatever the kitchen garden offered. The two-day method was a practical convenience, since removing fat from warm stock is harder than lifting it from cold, and a cold cellar or larder did the work overnight for free. The vegetable list draws on a North American garden and its stores -- turnip, carrot, onion, potato and sweet potato from the root cellar, corn, peas and a single tomato from the rows outside -- and the naming of the recipe for "Mother" is often taken as signalling a dish transmitted by household practice rather than borrowed from a professional or French source. The shin itself was among the cheapest cuts on the carcass, prized precisely because its heavy connective tissue dissolves into gelatin over hours of low heat, giving body that no quick stock can imitate.