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Pepper Pot, Country Style
Place one pound fresh tripe and two calf's feet in a soup pot. Pour in three quarts cold water, add two medium carrots, two white turnips, two medium onions and one sound red pepper; tie in a bunch one leek, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one sprig thyme, one bay leaf, one clove, one sprig marjoram and one sprig mace; add this bouquet to the soup with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover pot and let slowly boil one hour and a half. Lift up the tripe, calf's feet, vegetables and bunch of herbs. Remove meat from calf's feet, cut in small square pieces, also the tripe, the carrots, turnips, pepper and onions. Remove fat from surface of soup, add above articles to the pot; add also two medium, peeled potatoes, cut in small square pieces, and a half gill white wine. Boil slowly thirty minutes, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
FILET OF SPANISH MACKEREL, FIN DE SIECLE Trim off fins, cut head off, split in two and remove the spine bone from a fresh Spanish mackerel of three pounds. Cut each filet in three slanting, even pieces, place in a lightly buttered baking dish. Season with teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Finely chop together one sound green pepper, six shallots, six well-washed and peeled fresh mushrooms and ten leaves tarragon; sprinkle this mixture over the fish. Divide half an ounce of butter in little bits and lay them evenly over fish, pour gill white wine into the dish. Cover with buttered paper, then set in oven to bake forty-five minutes. Remove, lift up paper, squeeze juice of a quarter lemon over and send to table in same dish.
Two dishes run together on this page: a tripe and calf's-foot soup, and a baked Spanish mackerel. Both were written for cooks who bought tripe already cleaned and blanched, and neither gives an oven temperature.
- Tripe needs far longerAn hour and a half will not tenderize modern tripe, which arrives bleached and partly cleaned but still tough. Plan on 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering before it is pleasant to chew, then proceed with the dicing and the final 30-minute boil.
- Calf's feet are the thickenerApart from the diced potato added at the end, they are the main source of body in the soup; there is no roux or cream. Ask a butcher to split them lengthwise; if unavailable, a pound of veal knuckle or oxtail gives comparable gelatin, though less of it.
- A gillHalf a cup (4 fluid ounces), so the half gill of white wine here is about 4 tablespoons, and the gill poured over the mackerel is a full half cup.
- "One sound red pepper"Sound simply means unblemished. Here it appears to mean a fresh sweet pepper rather than a chile, which is why it is later diced and returned to the pot as a vegetable rather than fished out.
- The bouquetChervil and fresh marjoram are the two likeliest gaps; parsley and a little extra thyme cover for them. "One sprig mace" is loose writing — mace comes as a blade or as ground powder, and a single blade is what is wanted.
- Skim before the potatoes go inCalf's feet throw a great deal of fat, and once the diced potato is simmering it becomes hard to lift cleanly. Chill the strained broth if you have time; the fat lifts off in a sheet.
- Oven and time for the mackerelThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate heat of around 350F suits it. Forty-five minutes will dry out three-pound mackerel fillets badly; the fish is done at 15 to 20 minutes, when the flesh flakes at the thickest point. The buttered paper is a cartouche and still worth using.
- YieldThree quarts of water reduced makes six to eight generous bowls of the pepper pot; the mackerel serves four.
"Pepper pot" covers several unrelated dishes, and this is not the famous one. The Philadelphia pepper pot — tripe, potatoes and a heavy hand with black pepper — is traditionally tied to Washington's army at Valley Forge, a story generally regarded as later legend, while the West Indian pepperpot is a cassareep-based stew of quite different character. What appears here is closer to a French treatment of tripe, dressed with a bouquet of leek, chervil, thyme and mace and finished with white wine. Tripe and calf's feet were cheap offal around the turn of the century and appeared constantly in hotel and household cookery; the gelatin from the feet did the work that a modern cook would get from stock.