Sheep soup

A soup which was mainly the product, à propos of I forget what, of BH observing that most proper soups involved vegetables rather than fish or meat. Which perhaps expressed preference rather than propriety, given that, over the years, I have made many soups involving either fish or meat, this last usually some sort of chicken, pork or a processed pork product like bacon, ham or even saucisson sec. Sometimes beef, but never, as far as I can remember lamb, perhaps because I find it quite difficult to make decent gravy to go with roast lamb - and public houses find it even harder. Quite a lot of orange lentils or pearl barley.

So the challenge was to make some soup out of lamb, to which I gave the provisional name of mutton broth. 

Order up a couple of lamb shanks from the Manor Green Road butcher. According to Bing, one can have front or back shanks, but I am fairly sure that these were back. Anatomically, the part of the back leg immediately below the knee, what in a human would be called the shin, more medically fib & tib, where the fibula is much smaller than the tibia, but as far as I can make out, in a sheep, the fibula is so much reduced that it is more or less absent and what one gets on the plate looks like one bone. With the shanks snapped above being from eBay rather than Manor Green Road: I forgot to take a picture of mine.

Boil up the shanks with some vegetables - onion, carrot, celery and first leek - for a couple of hours. Remove most of the meat from the shanks and set aside. Carrying on boiling for another couple of hours.

Remove the two bones and strain off the liquor from the mush using a jelly bag - which BH was somehow able to locate in her somewhat deconstructed kitchen. Let the liquor cool overnight, then put in fridge to harden off the skin of fat. Then lift it off with a perforated spoon, fish slice or some such.

Add some left over mashed potato and six ounces of pearl barley to the liquor. Bring to the boil and simmer for half an hour. Leave to stand.

An hour before the off, bring to the boil again and simmer for a bit longer. Add a coarsely chopped onion. 

Ten minutes before the off, add the meat back in, also coarsely chopped. Say two cubic centimetres in volume.

Five minutes before the off, add second leek.

We did about two thirds in the first sitting and very good it was too. We shall see how well it stands on Monday.

PS 1: references 1 and 2 might have been helpful in the matter of bones, but are both behind paywalls. Nor do I understand the name given in the title of reference 1, a name which suggests that our domesticated sheep are derived from a wild Asian stock. But I did turn up the image above, some evidence of considerable reduction, if not elimination.

PS 2: waking this morning, I remembered that I had a copy of the famous textbook at reference 3, dating from the year of my birth and once the property of my father. Perhaps a proper textbook would reveal all, unlike poking around on the Internet, a trick which has often worked in the past. Unfortunately, I was unable to put my hand on the book and it may have been retired at some point. But I then found that there were lots of cheap copies available secondhand and quite a few with the archive people at reference 4. From one of which I learnt that Romer was not particularly interested in sheep, so what I got was confirmation that the mammalian fibula was often much reduced, rather than anything more specific.

I was not able to take a snap from the book using Microsoft's Snipping Tool, as its controls seemed to interfere with those of the archive, but I was able to download a 1950 copy, all 600 and more pages of it, from the Birla Central Library in Pilani, India, from which the two snaps above are taken.

Quite possibly now evolved into the library turned up by gmaps, around 100 miles west of New Delhi.

A curious mixture of technology and countryside in Street View. But I have learned that the library is named for one B K Birla, the industrialist and philanthropist to be found at reference 5.

References

Reference 1: The corpus fibulae in sheep (Ovis ammon f. aries) – ontogeny, persistence, size and shape from the fetal period to adulthood - A. Boos a, M. Hässig b, T. Bartels - 2005. Unavailable.

Reference 2: Using the morphology of the hominoid distal fibula to interpret arboreality in Australopithecus afarensis - Damiano Marchi - 2015. Unavailable.

Reference 3: The vertebrate body - A S Romer - 1949.

Reference 4: https://archive.org/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basant_Kumar_Birla.