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Soup to Serve in Petites Marmites
4 lbs. beef from the round I fowl weighing 3 lbs. 8 inches beef marrow bone 6 pints (12 cups) cold water I large onion 2 cloves I large carrot I turnip 4 stalks celery Some toasted bread Salt I bay leaf I blade mace 12 whole peppers Remove the marrow from the bone. Saw the bone into inch lengths and put it into a large stoneware soup pot with the beef and the water.
Let it come slowly to boiling point, remove the scum, and set on a cool part of the stove to simmer for half an hour. Draw, truss, and roast the fowl for twenty minutes, then, when well browned, put it into the soup pot, adding the giblets well cleaned. Remove the beef and the chicken as soon as they are tender. Keep hot a part of the beef and a part of the breast of the chicken to serve in the petites marmites. The remainder can be used for other dishes. Press the cloves into the onion and add it to the soup with the bay leaf, mace, whole peppers, carrot, turnip, and celery, cleansed and pared, and cut into neat pieces. Allow to simmer until the vegetables are tender.
Remove the fat and strain the soup; add salt to taste and re-heat it. Into each small soup pot put two pieces each of chicken, beef, and vegetables, and pour over them the soup. Place on the covers and serve with small pieces of toasted bread.
A classic pot-au-feu built for individual lidded pots, and the whole point is a clear broth: the liquid must never do more than tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and clouds the soup past saving.
- Petites marmitesSmall lidded earthenware or porcelain pots, holding roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups each. Ovenproof onion-soup crocks or small cocottes with lids stand in perfectly; warm them before filling so the broth stays hot at the table.
- "A cool part of the stove"Coal-range language for a low, steady heat. On a gas or electric burner use the lowest setting; you want the barest simmer, with only occasional bubbles breaking the surface.
- Real timingsThe half hour after skimming only starts the process. Four pounds of beef round needs 2 1/2 to 3 hours to come tender, and a genuine stewing fowl 1 1/2 to 2 hours. If you use a supermarket roasting chicken instead, pull it at 45 to 60 minutes or the breast you are saving for the pots will be shredded.
- The fowlA 3 lb "fowl" meant an older laying hen, tough and deeply flavoured. Stewing hens turn up at halal and Asian butchers; failing that a 3 to 4 lb chicken works, with the shorter cooking noted above. "Draw" means remove the innards, already done for you.
- Vegetables go in late for a reasonThey are added only after the meats come out so they arrive tender rather than collapsed, and because you want recognisable pieces in each pot. Twenty-five to thirty-five minutes at a bare simmer is enough.
- Blade mace and whole peppersBlade mace is the dried outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole as "blades"; a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg substitutes if you cannot find it. Twelve whole peppercorns for 12 cups is deliberately restrained, and they are strained out.
- MarrowThe marrow removed from the bone need not be wasted: poached briefly and spread on the toast it follows the classic restaurant service of petite marmite, though the recipe itself does not say what becomes of it.
- Degreasing"Remove the fat" is easiest the next day. Chill the strained broth overnight, lift the solid cap off, then reheat and salt. Salting comes last because the broth reduces as it cooks.
- YieldTwelve cups of water yields roughly 8 to 10 cups of finished broth, enough for six to eight small pots, with a good deal of cooked beef and chicken left over -- the recipe says the remainder "can be used for other dishes."
The petite marmite is generally thought of as a Parisian restaurant conceit: the same broth as the household pot-au-feu, but strained bright and served in the miniature pot it appears to have been cooked in, so that each diner gets the meat, the root vegetables and the marrow toast together. The name is simply "little stockpot" — a marmite being the tall covered pot that sat at the back of a French range. Escoffier is often credited with a version of it, with the beef, the fowl and the marrow bone all in one pot. Its appearance in print alongside recipes for earthenware and fireproof china speaks to the appeal of vessels in which food could be cooked and brought to the table alike; the individual lidded pot was the most fashionable expression of that idea.