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Pot Au Feu, Mexicaine
Have three quarts boiling water in a large saucepan with one tablespoon salt, adding half pound fresh lean rump beef, one beef marrow bone and any chicken or veal bones at hand. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for fifteen minutes. Carefully skim the scum from the surface of the broth; add one small, peeled, red carrot, one medium-sized white turnip, one onion with a clove stuck in it, one small green pepper, two leeks tied up with two branches of white celery, also adding one bean garlic. Cover the pan and let slowly simmer for one hour and a half. Remove from the range, take the beef, carrot, turnip, onion and leeks from the pan; cut all these vegetables and the beef into small square pieces and place in a soup tureen, adding two Spanish sweet peppers cut into small squares. Remove all the fat from the surface of the broth, then pass through a cheesecloth over the vegetables and serve with six thin slices of toasted French bread.
A light pot-au-feu built on bones rather than a large piece of meat, given a Mexican accent by green chile and pimiento. The whole dish stands or falls on the broth staying clear, so the temperature of the water matters more than anything else.
- Never let it boil after skimmingKeep it gentle after skimming — "slowly boil" and "slowly simmer" both suggest little more than a tremble at the surface; the book gives no temperatures. A hard rolling boil emulsifies fat and released proteins into the liquid and the broth turns cloudy grey, and straining will not undo it.
- "One bean garlic"Probably a literal rendering of the French une gousse d'ail: one clove, not one head. Left whole it can be fished out with the other aromatics.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos, the squat sweet red peppers sold jarred or canned. Drain and dice them; they are added to the tureen without further cooking, so they keep their colour against the long-cooked vegetables.
- "One small green pepper"The recipe does not specify a variety. It goes in whole and is not among the items lifted out and cut up, so it flavours the broth and is strained away.
- The bouquetTwo leeks tied with two ribs of celery do the office of a bouquet garni here, though there are no herbs in it; the tie is so it lifts out in one piece. Split the leeks lengthwise and wash them thoroughly first; grit released into the pot is hard to remove without disturbing the settled broth.
- Skimming and defattingSkim in the first fifteen minutes while the scum is still grey and coherent; after that it breaks up. Chilling the strained broth and lifting the solid fat cap is far more effective than blotting the hot surface, if time allows.
- Marrow boneAsk a butcher for a cut centre-cut beef marrow bone. The marrow will loosen during the simmer — some cooks scoop it onto the toast rather than discarding it with the bones.
- YieldSix slices of toast gives the intended count: six modest servings, more a first-course consommé with garnish than a meal.
Pot-au-feu is the domestic backbone of French cooking — beef, marrow bone and root vegetables drawn slowly in water, the broth served first and the meat after — and the international cookbooks of the early twentieth century delighted in fitting it out with national costumes. Here the costume is a green chile, a clove of garlic and diced pimiento, which is roughly what a hotel kitchen of the period understood "Mexicaine" to signify on a menu; the technique underneath is unaltered Parisian. That habit of tagging a standard preparation with a place name owes a great deal to the codified garnish lists of professional French kitchens, where a fixed set of accompaniments earned a dish a permanent adjective. The result tells you less about Mexican cooking than about how cosmopolitan restaurant menus were assembled at the time, from a French base with local ingredients bolted on.