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Hot-Pot
Before Putting in your meat, cook in the water a celery, four leeks, two onions, two turnips, two carrots; then add the meat, with pepper and salt, and stew gently for three hours. If you can put in a marrow-bone as well, that will give the soup a delicious flavor.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in wartime cookery collections: no quantities, no pot size, and no indication of what cut to buy. The instructions that matter are the order of the vegetables and the gentle heat.
- Quantities are not givenThe original names vegetables but no weight of meat or volume of water. For a pot serving six, figure on about 3 lb of meat and 3-4 quarts of water — enough to cover by an inch or two.
- What "a celery" meansAlmost certainly a whole head of celery rather than a single rib; French usage counts celery by the head, and the other items here are counted whole too. Trim the root and coarse tops and use the rest.
- Cut of meatThis wants collagen-rich braising meat, not steak: beef shin, chuck, oxtail, or a mix of beef and pork with a piece of salt pork. Three hours of gentle stewing will only ruin a lean cut.
- Vegetables first is deliberateSimmering the aromatics before the meat goes in builds a flavored broth, but three hours later they will be spent. If you want something whole to serve, the spent vegetables can be lifted out and a fresh batch of carrots, turnips and leeks added for the last 30-40 minutes; the original does not say to do this.
- Marrow-boneWorth the trouble, as the note says. Ask for a split beef femur; the marrow melts into the broth and gives it body. Long simmering means the marrow will mostly render out, which is the point.
- "Stew gently"A bare tremble at the surface, around 180-190F, not a boil. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the liquid.
- Skim and season lateSkim the grey foam in the first twenty minutes and the fat at the end, or chill overnight and lift the fat off solid. Salt again after skimming, since three hours of reduction concentrates whatever went in at the start.
- ServingRelated one-pot stews of this family are often served as two courses from the same pot: the strained broth first, then the meat and vegetables with mustard, coarse salt and boiled potatoes. The recipe itself says nothing about how to serve it, and gives no yield.
Hot-pot here is an Englishing of hochepot, the Flemish and northern French one-pot stew whose name comes from the old verb meaning to shake or jumble together — the same root that gives English "hotchpotch" and the legal term "hotchpot." It is a genuinely old dish in the Low Countries, with a Ghent version, Gentse hochepot, still made with a mixture of beef, pork, mutton and sometimes pig's ear or tail. The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, edited by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and the vagueness of this entry is characteristic of the collection: these were dishes dictated from memory by people cooking for their families, not measured out for publication. Its recipes leaned on cheap root vegetables and long-cooked cuts at a time when British households were learning to do the same.