No. 186

Care to Be Taken While Preparing Broth

Des Soins a Prendre pour Preparer le Bouillon

First.—Select the freshest meats procurable; do not wash, but remove all that is not of the very freshest; bone and tie up each piece separately leaving them as large as possible; split the bones and put them into a soup-pot with cold water and the meat.

Second.—Heat and boil it up slowly to give the albumen time to dissolve in the liquid; it coagulates as soon as the liquid reaches one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and rising to the surface brings with it all the impurities contained therein, which is called scum.

Third.—Carefully remove this scum as quickly as it rises to the surface, and before the liquid boils, for after that the scum partly dissolves and the rest of it precipitates and destroys the transparency of the broth. When the broth is well skimmed, add salt, allspice, and vegetables; then keep it boiling as continuously and slowly as possible to prevent too much evaporation.

← No. 185 Fibrine Soups & Broths No. 187 Clear Bouillon →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a method rather than a formula — Ranhofer gives no quantities here because the proportions live in the numbered bouillon recipes that follow it. What it does give is the single principle that decides whether your broth is clear or cloudy.

The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it below a rolling boil -- Once the pot rolls, agitation emulsifies fat and breaks up the coagulated albumen so it disperses through the liquid instead of rising. Ranhofer insists the scum come off before the liquid boils, and thereafter wants it "boiling as continuously and slowly as possible" -- closer to what a modern kitchen would call a bare simmer, a lazy bubble breaking every few seconds, than to a hard boil.
Cold water startNot a quaint flourish. Soluble proteins leach out more readily in cool water and coagulate gradually as the pot heats, carrying particulate matter to the surface where it can be lifted off. Starting from hot water sets the proteins in place inside the meat and is generally held to cloud the broth.
The 150F figureBroadly right — the scum begins forming well below a simmer, around 150–160F. This is the window for skimming, and it closes as soon as the surface breaks.
"Do not wash"Current food-safety guidance agrees, though for different reasons: rinsing raw meat spreads bacteria around the sink without making the meat safer. Trim rather than rinse, as he says.
Splitting bonesAsk a butcher to band-saw them; marrow and cartilage exposed to the water are what give the broth body. A home cook without a saw should buy bones already cut.
Proportions and timeThe page gives none; as a modern starting point only, figure about 1 lb of meat and bone per quart of water, salted lightly at the skimming stage, and 4 to 5 hours at a simmer, with some loss to evaporation.
Allspice and aromaticsUse whole berries, three or four for a large pot; ground allspice will muddy both flavor and appearance. Vegetables go in only after skimming, as directed, since the debris they shed makes the surface harder to read.
CoolingThe one step the period text omits. Strain, then chill the broth quickly — a shallow pan or an ice bath — rather than leaving the pot to cool slowly on the stove, which holds it for hours in the range where bacteria multiply.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full account of the French professional system as it was practiced in America. Bouillon sat at the base of that system: it was the stock from which consommés, sauces and most of the soup chapter descended, so a page of general precautions before the individual recipes made sense in a book meant for cooks working a brigade. The explanation in terms of albumen and a specific coagulation temperature reflects the later nineteenth century's enthusiasm for putting kitchen practice on a chemical footing — the era of Liebig's meat extract and of household manuals that quoted degrees Fahrenheit at readers who had no thermometer. The underlying technique is much older than the chemistry used to justify it; slow, skimmed, never-boiled pot-au-feu is generally traced to the French domestic hearth long before anyone named the proteins involved.