No. 329

Mutton a la Cowley and Mutton Hochepot

Mouton a la Cowley et Mouton a la Hochepot

Bone and remove carefully the skin, nerves, and fat from three necks of mutton, cutting the meat into three-eighth inch squares. Put into a saucepan the fragments, bones and parings taken from the necks, also a split knuckle of veal; moisten with eight quarts of broth, and put it on the fire in order to boil the liquid; skim, and add some carrots, turnips, bunch of celery, leeks, and onions, all minced up fine, seasoning with pepper, salt, and cloves. Boil slowly and uninterruptedly for two hours; then skim off the fat, and strain the broth through a sieve. Put six ounces of butter into a saucepan, with four ounces of one-eighth inch squares of onions; add four ounces of leeks cut Julienne shape, half a pound of carrots, half a pound of turnips, two ounces of celery, all being cut in three-sixteenth inch squares, and the meat from the necks previously prepared; moistening the whole with the broth, and cook for two hours. Then free it from fat, season and add a garnishing of small chicken quenelles (No. 154), shaped as large peas and a pluche of chervil. A supplementary garnishing may be added of rice, or of pearl barley.

For Mutton Hochepot, use the mutton the same as explained for the above, adding for each quart of broth, one pint of the puree of dried peas, and half a pint of puree of spinach. For all mixed clear soups, the consistency should be approximately after the soup is drained, two-thirds of liquid to one-third of solid matter, while for thick soups, three-quarters liquid to one-quarter solid.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stockpot always going; scaled down, this is a two-stage soup — a mutton and veal broth, then a slow-cooked garnish of diced meat and root vegetables finished in that broth.

The hinge: cut everything the same sizeThe hinge: keep each element to its stated size -- Ranhofer specifies different dice for different things: meat in 3/8-inch squares, carrots, turnips and celery in 3/16-inch squares, onions in 1/8-inch squares, leeks cut Julienne, quenelles the size of peas. Consistency within each element is what keeps the garnish looking deliberate after two hours of cooking.
Three necks of muttonA neck of mutton is a modest bone-in cut, and three of them, boned and trimmed as directed, will yield a good deal less meat than their bone-in weight suggests. Lamb neck or shoulder is the practical substitute, since true mutton (older sheep) is a special order from a butcher and much stronger in flavour.
Eight quarts of brothThat is two gallons, which needs a 12-quart pot or larger. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible for a home kitchen; the ratios hold at any scale.
Knuckle of vealThe veal knuckle is there chiefly for gelatin and body. Other gelatin-rich joint bones -- veal or beef knuckle, or split lamb shanks -- do much the same job.
Quenelles No. 154Ranhofer's chicken quenelle forcemeat is broadly of the usual type: pounded raw chicken worked with a panada and enriched, then shaped into pea-sized dumplings and poached gently in broth. They must be poached below a simmer or they break up; leave them out entirely and the soup still works.
Pluche of chervilA pluche is the leaflets picked from the stems, added off the heat so they keep their anise scent. Flat-leaf parsley is the usual stand-in where chervil is unavailable, though it is a different flavour.
Two hours for the garnishModern practice would cut this. Diced carrot, turnip and leek at 3/16 inch are done in 20 to 30 minutes; the long cooking here is really for the mutton. Simmer the meat in the broth until tender, then add the vegetables for the last half hour.
The Hochepot versionPer quart of finished broth, stir in 2 cups dried-pea puree and 1 cup spinach puree. This turns it into a thick soup, so Ranhofer's own rule applies: three-quarters liquid to one-quarter solids rather than two-thirds to one-third.
YieldAt full scale this is a very large batch, though it will finish well short of the eight quarts it starts with after two boilings. Skim the fat twice as directed; mutton fat sets hard and tastes tallowy when the soup cools.

A Little History

This pair comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where numbered recipes cross-reference one another like a technical manual. Hochepot is the older and better-documented of the two names: it descends from the Flemish and northern French hochepot or Dutch hutspot, a mixed pot of meat and roots, and the word is generally traced to the same root as English "hotchpotch" and the legal term "hotchpot," all carrying the sense of things shaken together. The Cowley attribution is the sort of dedication to a patron or colleague that fills Ranhofer's pages and is usually untraceable now. What is most telling is the closing rule about consistency — two-thirds liquid to one-third solids for clear soups, three-quarters to one-quarter for thick — a reminder that in a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen a garnished soup was measured by proportion, not eyeballed.