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French Chef (Wipe veal remove from bone)
Wipe veal, remove from bone, and cut in small pieces; cut beef in pieces, put bone and meat in soup kettle, cover with cold water, and bring quickly to boiling-point; drain, throw away the water. Wash thoroughly bones and meat in cold water; return to kettle, add vegetables, seasonings, and three quarts boiling water. Boil three or four hours the stock should be reduced one half.
This is the stock base of a French-style consommé, printed without its ingredient list, which appeared alongside it in the original book. Read it as a method rather than a formula.
- What the quantities probably wereThe page gives no ingredient list at all: no weights of meat, no vegetables, no seasonings beyond the words "vegetables, seasonings." The only quantity stated is three quarts of boiling water. Stocks of this general type are commonly built on lean beef plus a veal knuckle with its bone, with an onion, carrot, celery and a few whole spices, but any figures are guesswork and should be treated as such.
- The blanching step is the pointBringing the meat and bones to a boil in cold water and then throwing that water away drives out surface blood and scum, and washing the bones afterward removes the grey coagulated protein clinging to them. Skip it and you will spend the next hour skimming. This is the French blanchir, and it gives you a cleaner start, though a genuinely clear consommé still depends on gentle cooking and a proper clarification.
- Do not actually boilThe recipe says "boil three or four hours," but a bare tremble, one bubble breaking every second or two, will serve you better. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and turns the stock cloudy and greasy, and no amount of straining will fix it. Note that a very slow simmer will not reduce the pot by half as quickly as the recipe expects, so allow more time.
- Veal bone is doing the workThe veal knuckle supplies the collagen that sets the stock to a jelly when cold; the beef supplies flavour. A modern butcher will sell veal bones on request, but beef marrow and knuckle bones, or a couple of pigs' trotters, give the same body.
- Reduction and yieldThree quarts reduced by half gives about a quart and a half of stock, enough for six servings of soup. Keep the lid off or ajar; a tight lid returns most of the condensation to the pot and will slow the reduction badly.
- Cooling and keepingStrain, then chill the stock quickly in a shallow pan rather than leaving a deep pot on the counter overnight. Lift off the solid fat cap the next day. It keeps four days refrigerated, or several months frozen.
Soup chapters of the American cooking-school era are where the debt to French professional cookery shows most plainly: the vocabulary of stock, consomm en of clarifying, and the assumption that a household kitchen could operate a soup kettle the way a restaurant kitchen did. The initial blanch-and-discard belongs to that French tradition, and it separates this kind of made stock from the older Anglo-American pot liquor, which simply used whatever water the meat had been boiled in. Veal knuckle was a favoured gelatin source: sold with the bone, and mild enough in flavour to let the beef dominate. Recipes headed with a chef's or a restaurant's name turn up regularly in cookbooks of this period, and such headings generally read as a claim to professional authority rather than as an attribution the reader could check.