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Potage, Constantinople
Cut in very small square pieces a half pound raw, lean mutton, three chicken livers, a small carrot, a turnip, onion, two branches celery and half a sound, peeled eggplant. Place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with three quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and one saltspoon saffron, add one pound mutton or lamb bones to pan and let slowly boil for one hour and fifteen minutes, being careful to skim off fat once in a while. Remove bones, dilute an ounce arrowroot in a bowl with two tablespoons sherry, add it to soup, mix well while adding, boil for ten minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear mutton broth thickened at the last minute, in the grand-hotel style of naming soups after cities. Nothing here is difficult, but two things decide the result: the size of the dice and the handling of the arrowroot.
- Saltspoon of saffronA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a generous amount of saffron by modern prices. Crush the threads and steep them in a little of the hot broth before adding, so the color and perfume distribute rather than sitting in stubborn threads.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadTrue mutton is scarce outside halal and specialty butchers. Lamb shoulder or leg works, though it is milder and sweeter; ask for a pound of neck or shank bones for the pot, as the recipe intends the bones to do most of the flavoring.
- Cut everything small and evenThis is a soup eaten with a spoon and no knife, so the mutton, livers and vegetables should be a scant quarter-inch dice. Uneven cuts mean the eggplant collapses before the carrot is done.
- Browning stageTen minutes in an ounce (2 tablespoons) of butter over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Take real color on the meat and onion here; it is the only browning the soup gets and the difference between a pale broth and a savory one.
- Chicken liversTrim the green-tinged bits and connective tissue, or the whole pot turns bitter. They will disintegrate somewhat over the long simmer, which is expected and lends body.
- The simmer, not a boil"Slowly boil" means a bare simmer for about an hour and fifteen minutes. A hard boil emulsifies the mutton fat into the broth and clouds it, which defeats the skimming the recipe asks for.
- Arrowroot and sherryAn ounce of arrowroot is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons. Two tablespoons of sherry will not slake that much starch; add a few tablespoons of cool broth to get a pourable slurry, then stream it in while stirring.
- Ten minutes after thickeningArrowroot thickens almost instantly and thins again with prolonged boiling. Two or three minutes at a simmer is enough to lose the raw starch taste; the full ten will leave the soup looser than intended. Cornstarch behaves similarly but gives a duller, less glossy finish.
- YieldThree quarts of water reduces to roughly two and a half, serving eight to ten as a first course.
Alexander Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York, built his international collection the way the grand kitchens of his day organized their repertoire: soups labeled by city or nation, each with a garnish or seasoning meant to stand for the place. Here the shorthand for Constantinople is mutton, eggplant and saffron -- three things a New York diner around 1900 might have taken as Ottoman -- even though the soup's construction -- brown the vegetables and meat, simmer with bones, finish with a starch slaked in wine -- is thoroughly French. Whether anything like it was eaten in Constantinople itself is another matter; Turkish cooking does have saffron and mutton in abundance, but the arrowroot liaison and the tureen service belong to the European hotel dining room. What the recipe does record is how routinely mutton and offal appeared in a soup pot before lamb became the premium cut and chicken livers a specialty item.