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Potage, Artagnan
Place in a saucepan two sliced carrots, one sliced turnip, one sliced onion, one sliced leek, one sliced branch celery, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a spring thyme, one bay leaf, two cloves, a sprig marjoram, two ounces raw ham, one piece knuckle of veal, one calf's foot. Moisten with six quarts water and half pint white wine, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan and slowly boil three hours. After it has cooked for an hour remove the calf's foot and plunge in cold water, remove and bone it, place the meat between two boards with a weight of four pounds on top and let stand thirty minutes, then cut meat into half-inch-square pieces and keep on a plate. Place three ounces of tapioca pearls in a quart boiling water with half teaspoon salt and gently boil forty minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Place on a sieve and thoroughly wash in cold water. Strain broth through a cheesecloth into another saucepan, skim fat from surface, then add calf's foot meat and tapioca. Boil ten minutes. Transfer into a soup tureen and serve.
A classical clear soup: a long-simmered veal and vegetable broth, garnished with cubes of gelatinous calf's foot and pearl tapioca. Nothing about it is difficult, but almost every step exists to serve clarity, so the technique matters more than the ingredient list.
- Keep it at a bare tremble"Slowly boil three hours" means a lazy simmer with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and veal protein into the liquid and you will never get the broth clear again, which defeats the entire point of the dish.
- The calf's footSplit calf's or cow's foot is still sold by halal, Caribbean and Latin butchers and by some old-style meat counters; order ahead. It supplies both the body-giving gelatin and the diced garnish. A pig's trotter behaves similarly, though the flavour is more assertive. There is no vegetarian or powdered-gelatin substitute that reproduces the diced meat.
- Why it is pressedThe hour-boiled foot is chilled, boned and squeezed under a four-pound weight so the soft collagen sets into a firm slab that can be cut into neat half-inch dice. Skip the pressing and it shreds. Any flat weight works: a plate with cans on it, or a foil-wrapped brick.
- "Branch" and other old termsA branch of celery is one stalk, not a whole head; branches of parsley and sprigs of thyme, chervil and marjoram are single stems. "Raw ham" means uncooked dry-cured ham, prosciutto or a piece of unsmoked country ham rather than a supermarket boiled ham.
- TapiocaUse small pearl tapioca, not instant or minute tapioca, which dissolves. Forty minutes suits the larger old-style pearls; check smaller modern pearls from about fifteen minutes and pull them when translucent with no chalky centre. The cold-water wash rinses off surface starch so the finished soup stays limpid.
- Fat removalSkimming a hot broth catches only part of the fat. If time allows, strain the broth, refrigerate it overnight and lift the solid cap off, then reheat, add the meat and tapioca and give it the final ten minutes.
- Seasoning and yieldSix quarts of water reduce to roughly four to five quarts of broth, enough for twelve to sixteen servings. Two teaspoons of salt across that volume is very light by modern taste; salt again at the end, once the broth has been strained and its strength is fixed.
- ServingServe in warmed cups or shallow soup plates immediately after the last ten minutes of boiling. Tapioca thickens and clumps as it stands, so this is not a soup to hold on the stove or reheat the next day.
The name is a garnish label from classical French cookery rather than a place or a dish in its own right: à la d'Artagnan is generally traced to Dumas's musketeer, and is often said to belong to a family of Gascon-flavoured designations borrowed by nineteenth-century kitchens; the historical model, Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan, came from Gascony. In practice such names told a cook what went into the tureen, in this case diced calf's foot and pearl tapioca in a veal broth. The book it appears in is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, who is said to have written out of decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe shows the house style plainly: a large-format restaurant broth built on knuckle and foot for body, a bouquet of a dozen aromatics, half a pint of white wine, the whole strained through cheesecloth, and a garnish prepared entirely separately so that the finished soup arrives clear. Tapioca, milled from cassava and imported through the Brazil and East Indies trades, had become a fashionable clear-soup garnish by the late 1800s precisely because the pearls stay whole and glassy where rice or barley would cloud the liquid.