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POT-AU-FEU, HOUSEHOLD (a restorative broth)
Put in a sufficiently large earthen pot four pounds of beef sliced, a good knuckle of veal, and a fowl half roasted. Add nearly three quarts of cold water, set it at the side of the fire, and skim gently. Add salt, two carrots, a turnip, three leeks, and half a head of celery tied in a bundle, an onion with a clove stuck in it, and let the whole boil slowly for five hours without ceasing. Then take up the roots and trim them neatly; taste the broth, using but little salt to flavour the soup; skim, add the roots to it, and serve. This is a healthy soup, and good in families where the nourishment of children is to be attended to.
A French household stockpot translated for English kitchens: one long, quiet simmer yields both a clear broth and the boiled meats and roots to go with it. Two things decide whether it works — the water must never reach a rolling boil, and the salt goes in sparingly, since five hours of reduction concentrates whatever you add early.
- Keep it at a bare tremble"Boil slowly for five hours" means a surface that barely shivers, around 190–195F. A true boil emulsifies the fat and drives albumen through the liquid, and the broth turns permanently cloudy. Setting the pot "at the side of the fire" was the period's way of getting an off-centre, gentle heat; a low burner or a 300F oven with the lid ajar does the same.
- The vesselEarthenware was the ordinary household vessel for this kind of long, slow cooking, and it holds heat steadily. Any heavy stockpot or enamelled cast-iron pot of at least 8 quarts works; you need the volume, since 4 lb of beef, a veal knuckle and a whole fowl fill a pot quickly.
- Three quarts is tightTwelve cups will not cover that much meat in most modern pots. Add water until the meat is submerged by an inch — expect closer to 4–5 quarts — and top up with boiling water during the simmer to keep everything covered.
- A knuckle of vealThis is the lower leg joint, sold now as veal shank or veal hock, sometimes cross-cut as osso buco. It is there for gelatin, not meat; it gives the broth its body and the lip-sticking quality that beef alone will not. A meaty beef shank or oxtail is the nearest substitute.
- "A fowl half roasted""Fowl" in this period generally means a mature bird rather than a young spring chicken -- tough, and the better for flavour; a supermarket roasting chicken of 4-5 lb stands in. Half-roasting first (about 30 minutes at 400F) browns the skin and adds colour and depth to the broth. Because a modern bird cooks far faster than a boiling fowl, lift it out after about 1½ hours or the flesh will shred to nothing.
- Cuts of beef"Four pounds of beef sliced" wants a collagen-rich cut, not steak: chuck, brisket, short rib or shin. Cut it into large pieces rather than thin slices, so it survives the five hours intact enough to serve.
- Skim, then skim againThe recipe skims at the start and again at the end, and both matter. Take the grey scum off during the first 20 minutes of heating; chill the finished broth if you want the fat to lift off as a solid cap.
- Vegetables and saltThe roots go in whole or in large lengths and are meant to be recovered whole and "trimmed neatly" for serving. Five hours will leave them very soft — add a second batch in the last 30 minutes if you want them presentable. Salt only lightly at the outset and correct at the end, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and serviceGenerously 8 servings of broth, plus the meats and roots as a second course. Traditionally the strained bouillon is sent to table first, often over bread, with the beef, fowl and vegetables following with coarse salt, mustard and pickles.
Pot-au-feu — literally "pot on the fire" — is the domestic backbone of French cooking rather than a restaurant dish: a pot of meat, bones and root vegetables kept at a murmur for most of a day, yielding broth for one course and boiled meats for the next. It is subtitled a restorative broth because nineteenth-century households treated good beef bouillon as something close to medicine, prescribed for invalids, nursing mothers and, as the last line here says plainly, for children who needed feeding up. The veal knuckle contributes almost no meat and is there for gelatin, which gives the broth its body. The insistence on a slow, unbroken simmer and repeated skimming reflects the era's concern with clarity in a broth.