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Mirepoix
This is the name given to a flavoring used for savory stew. It is made as follows:
Take two carrots, two onions, two bay leaves, two shallots and a clove of garlic, and mince them together with one-half pound of fat bacon and raw ham. Toss these in a stewpan with two ounces of butter and salt to season. Stew with one-half pint of red or white wine, and add to stock or sauce as required.
A flavour base rather than a dish in itself, made in one pan and then spooned into stocks, braises and sauces as needed. The instructions are compressed even by Oscar's standards, so a few clarifications help.
- The hinge: cook it down, don't boil itThe wine should reduce until the mixture is moist and jammy rather than soupy. A watery mirepoix dilutes whatever you add it to and defeats the purpose.
- Half a pintIn an American book of 1896 that is 8 fl oz, one cup. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons.
- "Fat bacon and raw ham"The half pound most likely covers the two together, though the wording can also be read as half a pound of each. "Raw ham" here means uncooked cured ham of the prosciutto or jambon cru type, not fresh pork; and the bacon called for is fatty salt pork or unsmoked streaky rather than modern sweet-cured breakfast bacon, whose sugar will scorch.
- Shallots and garlicTwo shallots most likely means two whole bulbs rather than two cloves off a large one. The vegetables should be minced fine and roughly even in size so nothing browns ahead of the rest.
- Salt with careBacon, ham and butter all carry salt, and the finished mirepoix goes into an already seasoned stock or sauce. Season lightly at this stage and adjust at the end of the dish.
- Wine choiceMatch the wine to the destination: red for beef and game braises, white for veal, poultry and fish sauces. The recipe leaves the choice open, treating the two as interchangeable.
- Yield and keepingIt refrigerates for several days and freezes well in tablespoon portions.
In classical French usage mirepoix covers two related things: the plain diced carrot, onion and celery that underpins most stocks, and the older, richer version given here, cut with bacon and ham and moistened with wine, which Escoffier's generation distinguished as mirepoix au gras. The name is generally traced to the 18th-century Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, whose cook is traditionally credited with the preparation, though the attribution rests on culinary lore rather than any document. Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of it is telling: the hotel's cooking was French in method even when its menus were American, and a book aimed at housekeepers still assumed they would want the professional building blocks alongside the finished dishes. The celery familiar from modern mirepoix is absent here, its aromatic work done instead by shallot, garlic and bay.