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Calves' Tails, Allemande
Cut two calves' tails in half-inch pieces and place in a saucepan. Cut one each carrot, turnip and onion, two leeks and two branches celery in quarter-inch-square pieces and place them with veal, add an ounce butter, set pan on fire, brown for ten minutes and stir once in a while. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, add one piece knuckle of veal, season with two teaspoons salt and a half teaspoon pepper.
Thoroughly wash and drain two ounces barley, add to soup and gently boil for two hours, being careful to skim the fat off surface once in a while. Take up knuckle, pour in one gill cream, boil for five minutes, pour soup into tureen and serve.
A clear barley soup built on gelatinous tail meat and a veal bone, finished with cream. Most of what needs translating here is vocabulary and one timing.
- Calves' tailsRarely stocked; a butcher will cut them to order, and oxtail is the usual stand-in. The recipe gives no weight, and calves' tails run lighter than oxtails, so match by the volume of cut pieces rather than by count. Ask for them sawn into half-inch rounds rather than attempting it at home.
- Knuckle of vealA veal shank or hock, bone and all, sold as osso buco cuts or as a soup bone. It goes in for gelatin and body, is lifted out before the cream, and the meat picked off it is worth returning to the pot.
- "Set pan on fire"Means set it over the heat, not flame it. The ten-minute browning is where the soup gets its colour; use a wide heavy pot so the vegetables and meat sear rather than steam.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Heavy cream holds up best here; lighter cream is likelier to break in a long-simmered stock.
- Two hours is optimisticTwo hours may be short -- tail meat needs collagen time, though these are half-inch pieces from a calf rather than beef oxtail. Check at two hours and give it another half hour or so if the pieces are not yet pulling from the bone.
- Barley timingTwo ounces is about a third of a cup of pearl barley, which will be soft well before the tails are. If you extend the simmer, add the barley for the last 60 to 75 minutes so it does not disintegrate into paste.
- SkimmingTails render a great deal of fat. Skim through the simmer as directed, or cool the soup entirely and lift the set fat off before reheating and adding the cream.
- The cream at the endBetter at a bare simmer than a rolling boil, and off the heat soon after.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of water reduces to roughly three quarts of finished soup: eight to ten servings as a first course.
"Allemande" on a menu of this period signals German style. The International Cook Book belongs to the era of the grand hotel and steamship kitchen, when a chef was expected to name a dish by nationality and produce a plausible version of it on demand, and when a whole vocabulary of tails, knuckles, cheeks and feet was standard restaurant stock-in-trade rather than nose-to-tail novelty. Calves' tails were cheap, richly gelatinous, and gave a soup the clinging body that no amount of flour could imitate. The oxtail soups still on English menus are the surviving branch of the same practice.