Pot Au Feu
Take a good-sized beef-bone with plenty of meat on it, extract the marrow and place in a pot on the back of the range, covering the beef with three or more quarts of cold water; cover tightly, and allow to simmer slowly all day long. The next day, before heating, remove the cake of grease from the top, and add a large onion (previously stuck full of whole cloves, and then roasted in the oven till of a rich-brown color), adding tomatoes or any other vegetables which one may fancy. A leek or a section of garlic adds much to the flavor. Rice may be added, or vermicelli for a change. Just before serving, burn a little brown sugar and stir through it. This gives a peculiar flavor and rich color to the soup. - Mrs. Col. Clifford Thompson, New York City.
A two-day beef broth built on one bone, finished with a roasted clove-studded onion and a spoonful of burnt sugar. Most of the technique holds up; the overnight rest is the part that needs rethinking.
- The overnight stepThe original simmers all day and the pot stands until the next morning, so the fat sets into a cake that lifts off easily. Cool the broth quickly instead — strain it into a shallow pan, then refrigerate once it stops steaming. The fat still lifts off in a sheet the next morning, and the broth spends no hours in the danger zone between 40F and 140F.
- "Back of the range"A coal range's back plate held a pot below a boil, probably somewhere near 180-190F, though the figure is an estimate. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting with the lid ajar, or a 200F oven. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and clouds the broth, which is the one thing this method is trying to avoid.
- The boneAsk for beef shank, cut crosswise, or a mix of marrow bones and meaty short rib. Three quarts of water wants about 4 lb of bone and meat. Extracting the marrow first, as directed, keeps the broth from turning greasy; save it to spread on toast.
- Onion brûléRoasting the clove-studded onion until deep brown before it goes in is not decoration — the browned sugars add much of the color and a good part of the depth. Halve it, cut side up, in a 425F oven for 30-40 minutes, or char the cut faces dry in a heavy pan.
- Burnt sugarMelt a tablespoon of sugar in a dry pan until it is the color of dark tea and just beginning to smoke, then add a spoonful of the hot broth to loosen it before stirring it in. Taken past that point it turns acrid and there is no recovering the pot.
- SaltNone is specified. Salt at the end, after the fat is off and any rice or vermicelli has cooked, since both the reduction and the pasta shift the balance.
- Rice or vermicelliCook either separately and add it to the bowls. Simmered in the broth it releases starch and clouds a soup that has taken two days to build.
- YieldThree quarts of water yields roughly two and a half quarts of finished broth, or eight to ten servings. The meat from the bone, shredded and returned to the pot with the vegetables, makes it a meal rather than a first course.
Pot-au-feu — literally "pot on the fire" — is the standing French household dinner in which meat, bones and vegetables simmer together and yield two courses: the strained broth first, the boiled beef and roots after. What Mrs. Thompson describes is a leaner American cousin, closer to a stockpot than to the full French service, and it reflects a kitchen where a range burned all day anyway and a bone left on the back of it cost nothing to cook. Her onion draws on two distinct French conventions: the oignon brûlé, a halved onion charred for color, and the separate oignon piqué, an onion studded with cloves for aroma; the spoonful of burnt sugar does the coloring work more bluntly, and commercial "browning" sold in bottles was built on exactly that principle. Her New York address and the borrowed French title may hint at the kind of contributed recipe that carried a little metropolitan polish, though the single attribution line in The Dixie Cook-Book supports no more than that.