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Hochepot Gantoise
Cut into half-inch-square pieces half pound each raw breast of mutton, beef, and lean pork, one raw pig's tail and quarter pound salt pork. Place them in a large saucepan with three quarts of water, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and two saltspoons grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and let cook on the range for thirty minutes. Add then a very small, well-cleaned green cabbage cut into quarters, eight small, peeled white onions, two carrots, two turnips, cut into julienne strips, and two crushed beans sound garlic and four branches of parsley tied together. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for an hour and a half, add two peeled raw potatoes cut into half-inch squares, and boil for forty-five minutes more. Mix in another saucepan a half ounce butter with one ounce flour, stir well while cooking for a minute, then strain the broth into pan. Mix well until it comes to a boil, then pour the contents of this into the original pan. Mix a little, take up the parsley, pour into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A Flemish boiled dinner translated into American measures around the turn of the last century. Nothing here is difficult, but the vegetable timings and one garbled translation need attention.
- "Two crushed beans sound garlic"A literal rendering of the French deux gousses d'ail — two sound cloves of garlic, crushed. Nothing to do with beans.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of nutmeg is half a teaspoon. Grated fresh, that is assertive but correct for a hutsepot.
- The meatsBreast of mutton is now sold as lamb breast or riblets and is very fatty; beef shin or chuck stands in well for the beef. A pig's tail is a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item, and a piece of hock or a trotter gives the same gelatine.
- Skim before the vegetables go inThe first half hour of simmering is there to throw scum and fat to the surface. Skim it off before the cabbage and onions go in, or the finished broth will be greasy and cloudy.
- Vegetable timingTwo and a quarter hours of boiling (the hour and a half, plus the forty-five minutes with the potatoes) reduces julienned carrot and turnip to threads and the cabbage to pulp. Add the cabbage and root vegetables for the last 45 minutes to an hour with the potatoes if you want them to hold shape; the original expects a soft, melded stew rather than distinct pieces.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer. A rolling boil shreds the meat and clouds the liquid, and three quarts will reduce sharply over the nearly three hours of cooking if the lid is left off, though the recipe directs a covered pan throughout.
- The thickeningThis is a small blond roux — half an ounce butter (1 tablespoon) to one ounce flour (a scant quarter cup) — loosened with strained broth and then stirred back into the pot. It gives a lightly bound liquid, not a gravy. Cook the flour a full minute so it does not taste raw.
- SaltA teaspoon for three quarts is modest, and the salt pork adds more. Season again at the end, after the broth has reduced.
- YieldAbout a pound and three quarters of meat, plus the pig's tail and the vegetables, in three quarts of broth: six to eight servings, ladled into a deep dish with bread alongside.
Hochepot and Flemish hutsepot are the same word, but the borrowing runs the other way: the Dutch form is generally taken from Old French hochepot, from hocher, to shake or jostle — a pot whose contents are shaken together rather than arranged. The Ghent version is the one that carried a reputation beyond Belgium, and it is defined less by a fixed formula than by the principle of several meats at once, traditionally including the cheap gelatinous cuts — pig's tail, ear, trotter — that give the broth body. Its appearance in an American book of international cookery around 1900 belongs to a moment when hotel chefs were compiling the regional dishes of Europe for a domestic readership, translating them measure by measure and occasionally, as with the garlic here, word by word into nonsense.