Meat (without fat or skin), 1 lb.; cold water, exact pint: heating 2 hours or more; to boil 15 minutes at the utmost. Beef tea or broth.—Beef, 1 lb.; water, 1-1/2 pint or 1 quart.
Obs.—To mingle vegetable diet in its best form with this extract, it will be sufficient, as we have explained in “Cookery for Invalids,” to boil down the kind of vegetable desired, sliced or cut up small, in a very moderate quantity of water, until its juices are well drawn out; then to strain off the liquid from it with slight pressure, and, when it has become cold, to pour it to the chopped meat instead of water. Several different sorts can be mixed together, and cooked in this way: the water must boil before they are added to it.
They should be much more tender than when merely boiled for table, but not reduced to pulp. The juice should remain clear; no salt should be added; and it should be quite cold before it is stirred to the meat.
When the extract is wanted for gravy, a small portion of onion, and of herbs, carrots, celery, and the other usual vegetables, may be stewed together, to give it the requisite flavour.
About an inch square of the Jewish beef (see Chapter of [Foreign Cookery]), whether cooked or uncooked, will impart a fine savour to it; the smoked surface of this should be pared off before it is used, and it may be added in thin slices.
BOUILLON.
(The Common Soup or Beef-Broth of France; cheap, and very wholesome.)
This soup, or broth as we should perhaps designate it in England, is made once or twice in the week, in every family of respectability in France; and by the poorer classes as often as their means will enable them to substitute it for the vegetable or maigre soups, on which they are more commonly obliged to subsist. It is served usually on the first day with slices of untoasted bread soaked in it; on the second, it is generally varied with vermicelli, rice, or semoulina. The ingredients are, of course, often otherwise proportioned than as we have given them, and more or less meat is allowed according to the taste or circumstances of the persons for whom the bouillon is prepared; but the process of making it is always the same, and is thus described (rather learnedly) by one of the most skilful cooks in Europe: “The stock-pot of the French artisan,” says Monsieur Carême, “supplies his principal nourishment; and it is thus managed by his wife, who, without the slightest knowledge of chemistry, conducts the process in a truly scientific manner. She first lays the meat into an earthen stock-pot, and pours cold water to it in the proportion of about two quarts to three pounds of the beef;[[15]] she then places it by the side of the fire, where it slowly becomes hot; and as it does so, the heat enlarges the fibre of the meat, dissolves the gelatinous substances which it contains, allows the albumen (or the muscular part which produces the scum) to disengage itself, and rise to the surface, and the OZMAZOME (which is the most savoury part of the meat) to be diffused through the broth. Thus, from the simple circumstance of boiling it in the gentlest manner, a relishing and nutritious soup will be obtained, and a dish of tender and palatable meat; but if the pot be placed and kept over a quick fire, the albumen will coagulate, harden the meat, prevent the water from penetrating it, and the ozmazome from disengaging itself; the result will be a broth without flavour or goodness, and a tough, dry bit of meat.”
[15]. This is a large proportion of meat for the family of a French artisan, a pound to the quart would be nearer the reality; but it is not the refuse-meat which would be purchased by persons of the same rank in England for making broth.