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Mutton Soup, Charcutiere
Cut in small square pieces half pound raw lean mutton, two ounces raw lean ham, two ounces raw lean bacon, one each medium carrot and turnip, one white onion, two leeks, two branches well-cleaned, crisp celery and one sound seeded green pepper.
Heat two tablespoons leaf lard in a large saucepan, add the above ingredients and gently brown ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with three and a half quarts hot water, add two pounds well-cleaned raw mutton bones, one teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon paprika. Mix lightly and let slowly boil for forty minutes; skim fat from surface once in a while, then add two peeled medium potatoes cut in similar way to the other vegetables, three saltspoons raw rice and one country sausage cut in slices quarter of an inch thick, and let boil forty-five minutes more. Remove bones, skim fat from surface, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A long-simmered meat-and-vegetable soup built on mutton bones and three cured or fresh pork products. Nothing here is difficult, but several quantities and ingredients need translating.
- Mutton, if you can find itTrue mutton — generally sheep older than a year, often reckoned at two — is uncommon in American markets. Hogget or lamb shoulder works, though the flavour is milder and the fat less assertive; the browning and the first simmer are unchanged, but expect a sweeter, less gamey broth.
- Leaf lardThe fat from around the kidneys, prized for its clean flavour. Ordinary rendered lard, bacon fat, or a neutral oil will brown the meat and vegetables just as well.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of rice is about three-quarters of a teaspoon — a trivial amount in three and a half quarts. It is there to lend a little body, not to make a rice soup. If you want the rice to register, a quarter cup is more in keeping with modern taste.
- Country sausageFresh, uncased or cased seasoned pork sausage, not a dry-cured salami. Slicing it a quarter inch thick and giving it forty-five minutes in the pot cooks it through thoroughly; it will also shed fat, which is why the recipe tells you to skim again at the end.
- Seasoning is deliberately lightOne teaspoon of salt for over three quarts is nothing, but the ham and bacon salt the broth as it cooks. Taste after the bones come out and correct then, not at the start.
- Skimming mattersWith mutton, ham, bacon, sausage and lard in one pot, the fat cap will be substantial. Skim during cooking as directed, and if you can chill the soup overnight the fat lifts off in a sheet — an improvement on straining it hot.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. A hard boil will emulsify the fat into the broth and cloud it, which defeats the skimming.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of water, reduced over roughly ninety minutes, gives around two and a half to three quarts of finished soup — eight to ten servings as a first course.
Charcuti he feminine of charcutier, and is often glossed as "in the style of the pork butcher's wife"; in French cooking the label generally points toward the pork butcher's counter, though not always to pork in the dish itself — sauce charcutière, for instance, is a brown sauce sharpened with mustard and gherkins and served with pork chops. Here the name is earned by the ham, the bacon and the country sausage stacked on top of what is otherwise a plain mutton and root-vegetable broth — pork used as seasoning rather than as the main meat. The recipe belongs to a moment when American cookbooks with international pretensions borrowed French kitchen vocabulary freely, sometimes precisely and sometimes as decoration, and when mutton was still an everyday market meat in the United States rather than the specialty item it has become. The green pepper and paprika are the giveaway that this is an American kitchen rather than a Parisian one.