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Potage, Argentina
Place in a saucepan a piece of veal knuckle, one beef marrow bone and a gallon cold water. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, let come to a boil, skim scum from surface, then add two medium carrots, one turnip, two onions, two leeks, one bay leaf, a sprig thyme and one clove. Cover pan and let simmer two and a half hours. Skim fat from surface, then strain through a cheesecloth into another saucepan, set on the fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil dredge in three ounces tapioca. Mix well with a whisk, then let slowly boil fifteen minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Add milk and grated white (meat) of a medium, fresh cocoanut, mix well, boil ten minutes longer, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear veal-and-marrow stock thickened with tapioca and finished with coconut. The technique is straightforward; the two things worth getting right are the tapioca and the coconut.
- Quantities and yieldA gallon of water will lose some volume over two and a half hours, though the recipe keeps the pan covered, so how much depends on the fit of the lid. Expect enough for roughly 10 to 12 as a first course. Halve everything for a household batch and use a 4-quart pan.
- The tapioca is the hingeThree ounces is about half a cup. Sprinkle it in a thin stream while whisking constantly, or it sets into lumps on contact with the boiling stock. Granulated (instant) tapioca will thicken in the fifteen minutes given; small pearl tapioca needs closer to 20 minutes and will stay visible as beads.
- "Add milk"This is genuinely ambiguous. Filippini gives no amount, and the phrase most likely means the liquid pressed from the grated coconut rather than dairy. Either reading works: about a cup of unsweetened coconut milk, or a cup of whole milk, added off the fiercest heat.
- Fresh coconutOne medium nut yields roughly 3 cups of grated meat. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is a fair stand-in; sweetened flake is not, and will make the soup cloying.
- Veal knuckle and marrow boneBoth are order-ahead items at most butcher counters. The knuckle supplies gelatin and body, the marrow bone flavor and fat. Meaty veal shanks sawn across will do the work of both.
- Simmer, do not boilAfter the initial skim, keep the pot at a bare tremble. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock, and no amount of cheesecloth will clear it afterward.
- One clove means oneA single whole clove for a gallon. Sticking a clove into an onion so it can be fished out is a familiar French kitchen technique, though this recipe does not call for it.
- After the coconut goes inTen minutes at a slow boil is enough. Longer and the milk fats separate, leaving specks on the surface of what should be a smooth soup.
Potage is simply the French word for soup, and its use here is a mark of the kitchen Alexander Filippini came from: he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, where French terminology was the professional language whatever the dish's claimed nationality. The national labels attached to recipes in The International Cook Book are best read as loose gestures rather than documented provenance, and this one is doubly so, since a coconut soup is far more at home in tropical South America and the Caribbean than in the beef country of the Rio de la Plata. What the recipe does reflect accurately is the era's two great imports from that part of the world: tapioca, the starch of the cassava root, which reached American and European kitchens in quantity through Brazil and is often said to have been a genteel soup thickener; and fresh coconut, which appears to have been shipped north in enough volume that a cook could be told to buy one without further comment.