No. 383

Veal Broth, Refreshing

Bouillon de Veau Rafraichissant

Mince up four ounces of carrots, four ounces of turnips, four leeks, and two celery roots; fry them in two ounces of butter, letting them attain a light color, then add ten pounds of split knuckle of veal, and moisten it all with water until well covered, then boil and skim; add salt and let boil continually for two hours. Chop very fine two pounds of bottom round of veal, free of fat, sinews and skin; to this add one whole egg diluted with a little water or cold broth, pour it gradually into the veal broth and clarify it by beating with a whip; return to the fire to boil slowly and continuously for three-quarters of an hour, adding one ounce of chervil, two ounces of lettuce, and two ounces of wild chiccory, all well washed and cut up fine. Boil again for twenty or thirty minutes, then strain either through a fine sieve or napkin.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a clarified veal consommé built for the sickroom, and it is scaled for a professional kitchen: ten pounds of bone plus two pounds of lean meat will yield roughly three to four quarts. Halving or quartering it changes nothing but the pot size.

The hinge: never let it boil hard after the clarification goes inOnce the chopped veal and egg are stirred in, the pot must come up slowly and stay at a bare tremble — a few bubbles breaking at one edge. A rolling boil shreds the coagulated raft and the broth turns cloudy and grey, which no amount of straining will fix.
Split knuckle of vealVeal shank, sawed lengthwise so the marrow is exposed — ask a butcher to cut it, as a home saw will not manage it. The gelatin from the split bone is the point; ordinary veal stew meat gives a thin, unset broth.
Celery rootsCeleriac, two whole roots, peeled and diced — not two stalks of celery. If celeriac is unavailable, use a large head of celery with the leaves, though the flavour is grassier and less sweet.
Wild chiccoryBitter chicory greens: escarole, curly endive or radicchio leaves all stand in. The bitterness is deliberate — this is a "refreshing" broth in the nineteenth-century sense, meant to be cooling and mildly aperient rather than rich.
ChervilFresh chervil, an ounce being a generous handful with stems. It is delicate and short-lived in heat; if you cannot find it, a mix of parsley and a pinch of tarragon approximates the anise note, but do not substitute dried.
Frying the roots first"A light color" means blond, not browned. Colour here would make the finished broth amber and beefy, which defeats the pale, clean result Ranhofer wants.
StrainingLadle rather than pour, and let it fall through a napkin or several layers of damp cheesecloth without pressing. Then chill and lift the fat cap off — a broth for an invalid should have none.
Salt and servingSalt only lightly during the first two hours; the volume drops considerably over the roughly three hours of total cooking the recipe specifies. Serve hot.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) after decades as chef at Delmonico's, and the section it sits in — broths and soups for invalids — reflects a period when a great restaurant kitchen was expected to cook for the sick as well as the celebrating. "Rafraîchissant" is a term from the older French medical kitchen: refreshing or cooling foods, in the humoral scheme that still coloured nineteenth-century dietetics, were the ones given to feverish and overheated patients, which is why the herbs here are lettuce, chervil and wild chicory rather than anything warming or peppery. Veal was one of the meats commonly thought suitable for invalids, held lighter and less "heating" than beef or mutton — though the preceding entry offers beef, mutton and chicken teas alongside it — and the egg-and-lean-meat clarification is the standard consommé technique of the era applied for a reason beyond elegance: a perfectly clear, fat-free broth was considered easier to digest. The recipe sits between a plain meat tea and a grain broth, all three offered as a small graduated diet for someone being fed back to strength.