Home › The Principles of Cookery › Poele
Poele
Poele is a kind of rich gravy which is used in expensive cookery to boil various meats in instead of water. It is especially suited for fowls, turkeys, sweetbreads, and similar meats which are in themselves a little insipid. The same poele may be used three or four times, and in favourable weather will keep several days. For ordinary domestic use it is a quite unnecessary expense. To make it, proceed as follows. Take a pound of fat bacon and a pound of lean ham, two pounds of veal, two carrots, and two onions, all cut up into dice. Put them into a stewpan with a pound of fresh butter, and stir constantly until the bacon is half melted. Add a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, two bruised bay-leaves, three or four cloves, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and three or four young onions. Pour in three pints of boiling water, cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents simmer gently for an hour and a half or two hours. Strain through a sieve, and press the meat and vegetables well, to draw out their juices. Keep the poele in a cool place until wanted.
A poêle is a fat-rich cooking bath for pale meats rather than a sauce in its own right, and almost everything about handling it follows from that. The two things to get right are keeping it pale and keeping it cold.
- Do not let it colourThe instruction to stir "until the bacon is half melted" means rendering over gentle heat with no browning at all. Any fond or caramelisation defeats the purpose: this liquid exists to poach fowl, turkey and sweetbreads while leaving them white.
- Three pintsCassell's is a British book, so these are imperial pints of 20 fl oz oroughly 7 US cups, about 1.7 litres. Against four pounds of meat, the carrots and onions, and a pound of butter, the strained liquid will come out well short of what went in, under a thick cap of fat.
- Add no saltA pound of fat bacon and a pound of lean ham, cured more heavily than most modern equivalents, do the seasoning. Season only the finished dish, and taste before you do, especially if you reuse the poêle and it has concentrated.
- The fat cap is the point, and the problemKeep the fat with the liquid while poaching; it insulates the meat and carries flavour. Chill it afterwards and the fat sets into a solid seal, the sort of covering a cold larder depended on.
- "Several days in favourable weather" is larder advice, not fridge adviceA rich, low-acid meat stock held at cellar temperature is ideal ground for Clostridium perfringens. Refrigerate below 40F, use within three days, freeze beyond that, and bring it to a full boil each time you take it out to poach in again.
- Meat has already been used onceAfter straining and pressing, the veal, ham and bacon have given up everything worth having. They are not worth serving; the vegetables even less so.
- Scale it downFour pounds of meat to poach one fowl is the arithmetic of a kitchen with a paying employer. A quarter batch -- 4 oz each bacon and ham, 8 oz veal, 4 oz butter, about 1 3/4 cups water in a small deep pan -- gives enough to half-submerge a pair of sweetbreads.
- Simmer, never boilBoth in making the poêle and in cooking in it, hold the liquid at a bare tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies the butter into the stock and clouds it, and it will toughen sweetbreads and breast meat before the inside is done.
Poêle is simply the French word for a frying pan, and the term survives here in the older sense of cuire à la poêle — cooking in fat rather than in water. By the middle of the nineteenth century professional French kitchens distinguished several white cooking mediums for insipid pale meats: a blanc thickened with flour and lemon for calves' head and cardoons, and richer butter-and-ham baths of this kind for poultry, sweetbreads and veal. What makes the entry characteristic of Cassell's is the editorial aside — "for ordinary domestic use it is a quite unnecessary expense." The dictionary was sold to middle-class English households who wanted to know what the grand restaurant and country-house kitchens were doing, and here at least it explains the technique in full while quietly advising the reader not to attempt it. Four pounds of meat and a pound of fresh butter thrown away as spent debris was a statement about a kitchen's budget as much as about its cooking.</p>