Mirepoix
It is probable that one of these days the common sense of mankind will rise in rebellion against Mirepoix this word and abolish it. What is the Duke of Mirepoix to us because his wife was amiable to Louis XV.?
If she be not fair to me, What care I how fair she be?
The Duke of Mirepoix made himself convenient to the king, and his name is now convenient to the people-the convenient name for the faggot of vegetables that flavours a stew or a sauce.
Take two carrots, two onions, two shalots, two bayleaves, a sprig of thyme, a clove of garlic; mince them very small with half a pound of fat bacon and half a pound of raw ham, and pass them in butter with pepper and salt. The Mirepoix is from this moment complete. It will afterwards, according to need, be moistened and heated with wine, and then it will be a Mirepoix of white wine or of red to be added to stock or to sauce, to simmer in it and give it a flavour.
The published receipts say nothing about the mincing. The direction is to simmer the Mirepoix for a couple of hours in order to extract the flavour, and then to strain it. On the other hand it will be found that to mince the Mirepoix fine with a three-bladed mincing knife (see Mincing Knife) will in ten minutes save a vast amount of time in cooking. It may require two hours to cook an onion or a carrot whole and to extract all their flavour; but onions, carrots, and bayleaves reduced to minute particles yield all their excellence in a minute or two. In another point the foregoing receipt differs from the received authorities. They enjoin a quantity of veal and much more ham. But the veal is waste-there is little or no flavour in the infant beef, and its only use is to render the Mirepoix gelatinous. There is not the same objection to the ham; but it is not too much to say that since Spanish notions on cookery became fashionable in France, now nigh two hundred years ago, the great cooks of Europe have become demented about ham, and have made all their Moisten sauces run upon gammon. More about this ham infatuation when we come to discuss the theory of the sauces.
This is mirepoix in its older, richer sense: a cured-meat and vegetable base cooked down in butter, not the plain onion-carrot-celery dice the word means today. The argument of the entry is that mincing it fine replaces two hours of simmering with ten minutes of work.
- The hinge: mince it fineThe whole point of the entry is that finely minced vegetables surrender their flavour in a minute or two, where whole ones need a two-hour simmer and straining. Cut everything to a fine dice or pulse briefly in a processor, and you can use the mixture directly rather than straining it out.
- Not the modern mirepoixToday mirepoix generally means onion, carrot and celery, commonly in roughly a 2:1:1 ratio. This version, with bacon and ham, is what later French kitchens distinguished as mirepoix au gras, and with the cured meat included it comes close to what Escoffier would call a matignon. There is no celery here at all.
- Quantities and scaleHalf a pound each of fat bacon and raw ham against only two carrots and two onions makes this very meat-heavy by modern taste. Half those weights gives a base that flavours a sauce rather than dominating it.
- Raw ham"Raw ham" means uncooked dry-cured ham — prosciutto, jambon de Bayonne, speck. Not cooked sandwich ham, which will simply dissolve without giving flavour. Fat bacon means unsmoked fatty streaky bacon or salt pork; smoked bacon will carry through strongly into the finished sauce.
- SaltThe instruction to season with pepper and salt was written when the saltiness of cured meat was less predictable than it is now. With a pound of modern cured meat in the pan, salt at the end if at all, and taste the sauce before adding any more.
- "Pass them in butter"Sweat over moderate heat until the vegetables are soft and the fat has rendered, without letting them take much colour. Ten to fifteen minutes.
- ShalotsShallots, two of them, in addition to the onions. They contribute a sweeter, sharper note and are not a substitute for the onions.
- Moistening with wineDeglaze the pan with a glass of white or red once the mixture is cooked, and let it reduce by half before adding to stock. Uncooked wine stirred into a sauce at the end tastes raw and thin.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written largely by the journalist E. S. Dallas under the name of the Soho restaurateur Auguste Kettner, is as much argument as cookery book, and this entry is a good example: it spends more words attacking the name than giving the method. The dish is traditionally traced to the household of the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, an eighteenth-century French diplomat, the preparation supposedly being the invention of his cook — a story generally repeated but not documented, and Dallas plainly thinks it a poor reason to burden the language with the word. His swipe at veal and at the "ham infatuation" of French cooking reflects a real shift in the period: the elaborate, meat-fortified foundations of high French cuisine were being pared back, and mirepoix came in time to mean the plain vegetable dice cooks know now. The couplet he misquotes — "If she be not fair to me, what care I how fair she be?" — is from George Wither, a seventeenth-century poet, and the sort of aside that marks the book as written for readers who dined well and read widely.