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Hoche Pot of Ghent
Clean two big carrots and cut them into small pieces, the same for two turnips, four leeks, two celeries, and a good green cabbage, only using the pale leaves. Wash all these vegetables will in running water, two or three times, and put them on the fire in three and one-half pints of water. Add salt, and let it cook for an hour. At the end of this time, add a good piece of pork weighing perhaps three pounds--for choice let it be cutlets. You can also add a pig's trotter. Let it cook for another hour, taking care that the meat remains below the water. At the end of that time, and half-an-hour before you wish to eat it, add potatoes enough to be three for each person. Watch the cooking so as to see that the potatoes do not stick, and finish the seasoning with pepper and salt.
A one-pot winter stew built in stages, with the vegetables going in cold and the meat and potatoes timed backwards from the table. Total cooking time is about two and a half hours, almost all of it unattended.
- The staging is the whole recipeVegetables get a full hour alone to build the broth, pork goes in for the second hour, potatoes only for the last thirty minutes. Put everything in at once and the potatoes disintegrate while the pork is still tough.
- Three and one-half pintsThe book was compiled in Britain, so these are almost certainly Imperial pints: roughly 2 litres, or about 8 1/2 US cups. Use enough that the meat stays submerged, which the recipe explicitly asks for, and top up with boiling water if it drops.
- "Two celeries"In older usage this most likely means two whole heads of celery rather than two stalks. Read that way, it is a substantial amount of vegetable.
- Pork cutletsThe recipe's "cutlets" here points to thick bone-in chops. A 3 lb piece of bone-in pork shoulder does the same job and is more forgiving over two hours of simmering.
- The trotter is not optional in spiritIt supplies the gelatine that gives hochepot its body. A split pig's foot from a butcher, or a piece of pork skin, keeps the broth from tasting thin.
- Skim, and keep it at a bare simmerBring up slowly and lift the grey foam off in the first ten minutes. A rolling boil emulsifies the pork fat and clouds the broth.
- Pale cabbage leavesThe recipe asks for only the inner pale leaves. Save the dark outer leaves for something else rather than adding them here.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of pork with three potatoes a head suggests roughly four to six servings. The broth is often ladled out first with a little of the vegetable, with the meat and potatoes following on a warmed dish.
Hochepot takes its name from the old French hocher, to shake or jog, with pot. The word travelled into English as "hotchpotch" and "hodgepodge", which is what a shaken-together stew of whatever the garden and the pig yielded eventually came to mean in ordinary speech. Ghent's version is the best known of the Flemish hochepots, usually made with several kinds of meat, and this one is a modest household rendering built on pork and a trotter rather than the fuller versions using oxtail and mutton. It appears in The Belgian Cook Book, assembled during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees in Britain, which explains the tone throughout: the dishes chosen are the sturdy, cheap, one-pot cooking of home rather than anything showy, recorded by people whose kitchens they had been forced to leave.