Court Bouillon
Wash four pounds of fresh cod. Cover with three quarts of water, add one bay leaf, four cloves, six whole peppercorns, one small clove of garlic and teaspoon of celery seed and cook for one hour; then add one quart of tomatoes and two teaspoons of salt; cook for fifteen minutes, strain and clarify. Reheat, add one teaspoon of lemon juice and one teaspoon of very finely chopped parsley. The soup should be clear and red.
Serve with croutons.
A clear fish broth rather than the poaching liquid the name usually signals today. The whole point is clarity and colour, so the straining and clarifying steps carry the dish.
- Clarify means an egg-white raftCool the strained stock, whisk in a lightly beaten egg white (and its crushed shell, if you like) per quart, bring it slowly to a bare shiver without stirring, and let the raft set for ten minutes before ladling the liquid out through a cloth-lined sieve. Boiling at this stage will break the raft and cloud everything you have gained.
- The hour of simmeringAn hour is long by modern stock practice, where fish frames are usually lifted out after 20-30 minutes. With four pounds of fish in three quarts of water the dilution is generous, and a gentle simmer with no rolling boil matters more here than the clock.
- "One quart of tomatoes"Most likely canned or home-canned tomatoes measured by volume, though the recipe does not say; roughly two 14.5 oz cans, about 820 g with their juice. Whole plum tomatoes crushed by hand give a cleaner red than modern diced tomatoes, which are firmed with calcium chloride and shed less colour.
- Fish choiceFour pounds of cod may well have included head, frame and trimmings as much as fillet; ask for a cod or other white-fish frame with the gills removed, since gills carry bitterness and blood. Oily fish will not give the clear red the recipe asks for.
- Salt goes in late for a reasonThe two teaspoons arrive with the tomatoes, near the end. Salting a stock at the start means salting the volume you have before reduction; taste again after clarifying, when the flavour is at its final concentration.
- StrainingStrain first through a colander to pull out bones and aromatics, then through a sieve lined with damp muslin or a coffee filter. Do not press the solids: that is what puts fine sediment into a soup meant to be transparent.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect perhaps two quarts after an hour's simmering, straining and clarifying, enough for six to eight small first-course servings. Serve very hot in warmed bowls; a clear soup loses heat fast.
Court bouillon is usually a short broth for cooking fish in, so that the fish itself, not the liquid, is the dish. What this book prints is the older, thriftier reading: having cooked the fish, you have a seasoned broth, and it goes to the table as soup. The tomato is doing double work here, acidity to balance the fish and the red colour that the recipe insists on as a mark of success. Clear soups were a test of a careful cook in this period, and clarifying with egg white was taught as an ordinary domestic skill rather than a restaurant flourish. The croutons are not decoration; a clear soup carries no body, and the bread supplies it.