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Osol Polonaise
Bone half a fresh fowl and cut into half-inch pieces. Cut into same size half pound raw beef, two ounces each raw veal and salt pork and place in a saucepan with seven pints cold water. Season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, set on the fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil skim off the fat; then add one carrot, one turnip, two onions and three branches celery. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches parsley, one bay leaf, one clove, one spring thyme and a bean garlic; add to the pan, cover, and let gently simmer for two hours. Remove the vegetables and bouquet, skim off the fat, dredge in two ounces sago, mix well and let boil for fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring at the bottom. Add a gill cream, mix a little, let boil for two minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A Polish-style boiled broth thickened lightly with sago. The quantities are generous — seven pints of water — so plan on a large stockpot and a crowd.
- YieldSeven pints of water with roughly a pound and a half of meat should give eight to ten servings as a first course. The recipe can be scaled down, though halving "half a fowl" and the two-ounce quantities is awkward.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is all the cream the pot gets, and it is meant to soften the broth rather than turn it into a cream soup.
- Boning the fowl"Fowl" in period usage generally indicated a mature bird, tougher and more flavourful than a modern supermarket broiler; half a 4-5 lb chicken is the nearest substitute. The recipe calls for the bird to be boned and cut into half-inch pieces, so the finished soup carries boneless meat.
- SagoPalm starch sold as small pearls, once common and now mainly found in Asian and Indian groceries. Small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically. Dredging means scattering it in slowly while stirring, or it clumps.
- The fifteen-minute boilSago must be stirred off the bottom during this stage as instructed — it sinks and scorches, and burnt starch will taint the whole pot. The pearls should turn translucent.
- Cream at the endThe cream goes in at the very last moment and boils only two minutes, so it is barely cooked; there is no reason to prolong it.
- The bouquet"A bean garlic" is one clove of garlic; "a spring thyme" is a sprig. Tying the leeks, parsley, bay, clove, thyme and garlic in a bundle is purely for easy removal — cheesecloth or kitchen twine both do the job.
- SkimmingThe recipe skims twice, at the first boil and again before the sago goes in. This matters more than it sounds: fat left in suspension will keep the finished soup from clearing, and the starch will hold it there.
- SaltA level tablespoon into seven pints is modest, and the salt pork adds more. Taste after the vegetables come out and before the cream goes in.
The name is often said to derive from rosół, the clear boiled meat broth that is the foundation of Polish home cooking and still the standard Sunday soup in much of Poland; "polonaise" in a period American cookbook simply flagged a dish as Polish in manner. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, assembled The International Cook Book as a survey of national styles for an English-speaking audience, and his versions tend to be filtered through French restaurant technique — hence the bouquet garni, the careful double skimming, and the finish with cream, none of which a Polish cook would necessarily recognize as part of rosół. The mix of fowl, beef, veal and salt pork in one pot may reflect a common assumption of the era that a good broth needed several meats for depth, and the sago is a Victorian thickener that fell out of American use as cornstarch and flour-based liaisons took over.