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Potage De Veau
Take a knuckle of veal weighing about five pounds. Cut off the meat, not too closely, and break the bone into small pieces. Put these into a stewpan with an onion, a large blade of mace, a dozen peppercorns, a bunch of parsley, and a small sprig of thyme. Pour over all two quarts of cold water. Cover the saucepan closely, and simmer the liquid gently for five hours. Strain the soup, and leave it until the next day; it ought to form a jelly. Put it, free from fat and sediment, into a stewpan, with a little pepper and salt, and any vegetables or mixture of vegetables that may be chosen. Jerusalem artichokes, seakale, and celery, are the most suitable. Stew these until they are quite tender, and press them through a hair-sieve. Make the soup hot, mix with it half a pint of boiling cream, and serve. Send fried crusts to table on a separate dish. Time to simmer the soup, five hours the first day from the time the water reaches the boiling point; one hour and a half the second. Probable cost, varying with the ingredients. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A two-day white veal stock thickened only with puréed vegetables and cream — no flour anywhere. The success of it rests entirely on the stock setting to a jelly overnight.
- The hinge: a bare simmerVeal bone gives up gelatine but also scum and fat; a rolling boil emulsifies both back into the liquid and the result is cloudy and greasy. Keep it at a lazy tremble for the full five hours, skimming the first half hour.
- Knuckle of vealA veal knuckle (the lower leg with the joint) may need ordering ahead from a butcher. Ask for it sawn into 2-inch pieces rather than breaking bone yourself; if a five-pound knuckle is not available, make up the weight with knuckle plus meaty shank.
- The reserved meatThe recipe has you cut the meat off "not too closely" and never returns to it. It was assumed to go to another dish — a mince, a fricassee, a pie. Cook it in the stock for the first 90 minutes, lift it out, and use it separately.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts is about 2.3 litres; half a pint of cream is about 280 ml. A large blade of mace is roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace if you cannot find whole blades.
- Chilling and degreasingThe overnight rest is not optional — it is how the fat lifts off in a solid cap and the sediment settles. Refrigerate, not a cold larder. If the stock does not jelly, it was under-simmered or over-diluted; reduce it before proceeding.
- SeakaleSeakale is a blanched winter vegetable now grown by very few market gardeners. Substitute the white part of leeks or chard stems; Jerusalem artichokes and celery are still easy to get and give the sweeter, nuttier version of the soup.
- Sieve and creamA hair sieve was a fine drum sieve. A food mill or blender followed by a pass through a fine chinois does the same work faster. The recipe calls for boiling cream stirred into hot soup; scalding the cream separately and stirring it in off the heat is safer, as hard boiling the finished soup can turn it grainy.
- Yield and serviceEight or nine portions as a first course, fewer if served as a main. The fried crusts are bread cut small and fried -- the recipe does not say in what -- and sent to table separately so they stay crisp.
Veal knuckle was a mainstay of nineteenth-century English stockpots because it is rich in gelatine and mild in flavour: it produced the clear, wobbling "jelly" that cooks of the period judged a stock by, and it carried whatever vegetable was put into it without arguing. The recipe works as a demonstration of the principle -- one base turned into artichoke, seakale or celery soup depending on the season and the garden. The name is a piece of the kitchen French common in English cookbooks of the period, when a fashionable table was expected to look Parisian even when the ingredients were resolutely local. The cream-finished, flourless purée soup is a forerunner of what later cookery writing calls a cream soup; the fried crusts are sent separately so they would not soften before reaching the table.