No. 305

Croute au Pot

Put into an earthen pot (a pipkin) twelve quarts of stock, adding a piece of the rump of beef, which must weigh eight pounds when trimmed and free from part of its fat, and a fowl weighing four pounds, drawn, singed and well washed; then add one pound of carrots, half a pound of onions with four cloves in them, two ounces of celery, and twenty-four whole peppers. Let boil up, salt it, and continue boiling very slowly for three hours and a half to four hours. Remove the vegetables as soon as each one is done, pare the carrots cork shaped one inch in diameter, and cut them into three-sixteenth inch thick pieces; the turnips shaped like a clove of garlic. Cut lengthwise in two some small French rolls, make them into pieces two inches long, scoop out the crumbs, and on this side besprinkle them with some good chicken fat, brown them in a hot oven. Lay them on a dish, the rounded side uppermost, and one beside the other; sprinkle them over again with chicken fat, and brown them in the oven. Cut a cabbage into four parts, wash these in plenty of water, and blanch in salted water for ten minutes, then drain, and refresh for half an hour; press well, and put it in a saucepan with a carrot cut in four, and one onion with cloves in it; season with salt and pepper, and moisten with stock and half a pint of chicken fat; the cabbage must be covered two inches above its height, then cook for two hours. When the cabbage is done, drain, and serve it in a vegetable dish with the rolls around, and lay the carrots and turnips on top; send the soup to the table in a separate soup tureen.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's kitchen recipe scaled for a restaurant service: twelve quarts of stock, eight pounds of beef and a whole fowl. Everything about it works at a quarter scale, but read the note on turnips first.

The turnips are missingThe finished dish calls for turnips pared into garlic-clove shapes, but no turnips appear in the ingredient list. Add about half a pound of small turnips to the pot along with the carrots and onions.
Scaling downDivide everything by four for a household pot: 3 quarts stock, a 2 lb piece of beef rump, a small 1 lb piece of chicken (a thigh-and-leg quarter works), 4 oz carrots, 2 oz onion with a clove, a rib of celery, six peppercorns. At full size it is a banquet quantity.
PipkinA pipkin is an earthenware cooking pot with a handle. Any heavy stockpot or Dutch oven does the same job here.
"Boiling very slowly"Keep the pot at a bare simmer, barely shivering, for three and a half to four hours rather than a rolling boil.
Pull the vegetables earlyThe instruction to remove each vegetable as it is done is not fussiness. Carrots and turnips are cooked in 20-30 minutes; left in for four hours they collapse and there is nothing to shape and garnish with.
Hot ovenFor browning the rolls, 425-450F. Watch them, they take five to eight minutes; the crusts are brushed with fat twice and go from golden to burnt quickly.
Chicken fatSchmaltz, rendered from the fowl or bought. The half pint used to braise the cabbage is a restaurant quantity and gives a very rich result; a few tablespoons in the braising liquid is closer to modern taste.
Refreshing the cabbageAfter blanching ten minutes, "refresh" means to plunge it into cold water for half an hour to stop the cooking and set the colour, then squeeze the water out before braising.
ServingThe recipe sends two vessels to table: the cabbage in a vegetable dish ringed with the browned crusts and topped with the shaped carrots and turnips, and the soup separately in a tureen. It says nothing about what becomes of the beef and fowl.

A Little History

Croûte au pot is pot-au-feu served the formal way: the broth strained into a tureen, the boiled meats set aside as a course of their own, and the bread crusts — the croûtes — dried and browned in fat rather than simply dropped in raw. It belongs to a French bourgeois tradition of one pot yielding a whole dinner, which nineteenth-century restaurant kitchens borrowed and formalised; Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 with this recipe among some 3,500 others, and the quantities here reflect a professional kitchen where twelve quarts of stock was a working batch rather than a household undertaking. The insistence on shaping the carrots "cork shaped" and the turnips like a clove of garlic marks the difference between the family version and the restaurant one: same pot, same bones, but every garnish cut to a pattern.