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Petite Marmite
Have in a large saucepan three quarts of boiling water with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Tie up two pounds of buttock beef with strings and add to the pan, with any beef, chicken or veal bones on hand; let slowly come to a boiling point. Carefully remove the scum from the surface with a skimmer. Peel and wash well two medium carrots, two small turnips and add to the soup. Cover the pan and boil for ten minutes. Tie together two leeks, three branches of parsley and three branches of celery and add to the pan. Also add one small white onion, two cloves, one bay leaf, one sprig of thyme, six pepper corns and quarter of a small, well-washed cabbage; let very slowly simmer for two and a half hours. It is very important that during the two and a half hours it should simmer exceedingly slowly but continuously; by so doing you will be able to obtain a clear, strong, excellent broth. Remove the meat and all the vegetables. Carefully skim the fat from the surface of the broth. Cut the meat into half-inch square pieces, and the vegetables--except the parsley--into quarter-inch-square pieces, and place in a hot soup tureen. Strain the broth through a cheesecloth into the tureen; place in tureen six slices of freshly toasted French bread; sprinkle over half a teaspoon of chopped parsley and serve.
A clear boiled-beef broth served with its meat and vegetables cut small. Everything about the result depends on the heat under the pan.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it below a boil -- The recipe does call for a ten-minute boil once the carrots and turnips are in, but the two-and-a-half-hour stretch that follows should barely shiver, an occasional bubble only (roughly 180-190F on a modern thermometer). A rolling boil emulsifies fat and albumen into the liquid and the broth turns cloudy; straining will not undo it, though clarifying with egg white can.
- Buttock beefAn older butcher's term for the round — top rump, silverside or bottom round. Ask for a lean, tied piece from the hind leg; brisket or short rib will work but gives a fattier, less clear broth.
- Start cold if you want brothThe recipe adds the beef to boiling water, which draws less out of the meat and leaves more flavour in it. If you care more about the liquid than the beef, start it in cold water and bring it up slowly -- either way the scum must come off before the vegetables go in.
- Cabbage timingA quarter cabbage simmered two and a half hours turns grey and sulphurous and will scent the whole pot. Add it in the last 30–40 minutes; the carrots and turnips will also hold their shape better added an hour in rather than at the start.
- The bouquetTying the leeks, parsley and celery together lets them be lifted out whole; here they are not discarded but diced and returned to the tureen. The recipe simply adds the two cloves loose, though studding them into the onion is the usual way of keeping track of them. Peppercorns and bay are easier retrieved in a small muslin bag.
- DefattingSkimming hot only takes the surface. Chilling the strained broth overnight lets the fat set into a cap you can lift off in one piece.
- YieldThree quarts of water, reduced over the simmer, gives roughly six generous servings — which matches the six slices of toast.
Petite marmite takes its name from the vessel rather than the dish: a marmite is the tall, straight-sided stockpot of the French kitchen, and the small earthenware version was traditionally brought to the table with the broth still in it. It belongs to the same family as pot-au-feu, the boiled-beef dinner that fed French households for centuries, but restyled for restaurant service — the meat and vegetables diced small, the broth clarified, the whole thing a first course rather than the entire meal. The version served with marrow bones and cheese-topped toasts was a fixture of Paris grand-hotel menus around the turn of the twentieth century, and its appearance in an international cook book of this period reflects how thoroughly French restaurant vocabulary had colonised English-language menus by then. The insistence on a slow, unbroken simmer is not fussiness: clarity was the whole point of the dish, and a clear consommé was the standard by which a kitchen's stockpot was judged.