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Croute-Au-Pot
Cut two carrots and one turnip into round slices and add to these a few short pieces of celery stalks and a little white cabbage. Stew these for a few minutes in a covered stewpan and add one heaping tablespoonful of butter. As soon as the vegetables are beginning to take color pour over them three pints of broth, half a tablespoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of pepper. Boil this slowly for one-half hour or more, and then pour into a hot tureen in which a few pieces of toasted bread or rolls have been previously placed. Serve very hot.
A clear vegetable broth poured over toasted bread at the table. Almost everything depends on the broth, since the recipe adds nothing else to build flavor.
- The hinge: the brothWith only root vegetables, butter and bread in play, a weak or salty commercial stock leaves you with hot water and toast. Use a genuine beef or beef-and-chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted, and taste before adding the specified salt.
- Three pintsSix cups (about 1.4 liters), which yields four to six modest servings as a first course.
- The pepperA full teaspoon of pepper in six cups of broth is aggressive by current taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon of freshly ground white or black pepper and adjust at the end.
- Order of operationsThe text says to stew the vegetables briefly and then add the butter; in practice melt the butter first and sweat the vegetables in it, covered, over low heat. "Beginning to take color" means the faintest gold, not browning — this soup should stay clear.
- Cutting the vegetablesSlice the carrots and turnip thin, no more than an eighth of an inch, and shred the cabbage finely. At half an hour of slow simmering, thick pieces will still be firm while the cabbage has gone gray.
- The breadUse a dry, close-crumbed loaf, sliced and toasted hard, or the crusts left from a baguette. Soft modern sandwich bread turns to paste the moment the broth hits it. Warm the tureen and the bread first, and pour at the table.
- SkimmingButter plus simmering leaves fat on the surface. Skim it before ladling, or the soup reads greasy against the dry bread.
Croûte-au-pot is associated with the French pot-au-feu: crusts of the loaf, dried out and moistened with the broth in which the beef and vegetables were boiled. The name is generally read as "crust in the pot," and the dish belongs to a long European family of bread soups — panade, zuppa, sops — in which stale bread is the body and the stock is the whole of the seasoning. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf around the turn of the twentieth century, worked in a period when the dish was part of the grand-hotel repertoire, where menus were commonly written in French. The version here reads as a hotel cook's shorthand, assuming a stockpot always at the ready and a supply of yesterday's rolls.