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Potage, Dublin
Cut a pound lean mutton in half-inch squares, heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, add mutton and brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts water, adding two pounds cleaned mutton bones, season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper, cover pan and slowly boil for one hour. Cut four good-sized, peeled raw potatoes in quarter-inch-square pieces and add to soup. Finely chop together three branches well-washed parsley two branches chervil and six branches chives, add to soup, mix a little and simmer for forty-five minutes. Lift up bones from soup, skim off fat from surface, add half ounce butter, mix well, pour in a soup tureen and serve.
A straightforward mutton-and-potato broth that depends almost entirely on the quality of the bones and on cutting the potatoes small enough to hold their shape. Two hours of mostly unattended cooking gives roughly six to eight servings.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerThe instruction to "slowly boil" means barely trembling, not rolling. A hard boil emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and clouds the broth, and the final skimming will not rescue it.
- Mutton and its bonesMutton is sheep over about two years old; most butchers now sell lamb, which is milder and needs less cooking. Shoulder or neck is the right cut here. If you cannot get two pounds of bones, ask for lamb neck bones or use shanks and count them toward the meat weight.
- Proportions to expectThree quarts of water to one pound of meat is a thin broth by design. The pan is covered, so it will lose some liquid over the two hours of cooking, but how much depends on how tightly it is lidded. Do not top it up unless it drops below about two quarts.
- Potatoes cut smallQuarter-inch dice will be fully soft well before forty-five minutes and some will break down and lightly thicken the soup, which is the point. A waxy or all-purpose potato holds its edges; a russet will dissolve almost entirely.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and it loses everything when dried. Substitute a small handful of flat-leaf parsley plus a few tarragon leaves, or simply increase the parsley and chives.
- "Branches" of herbsA branch is a sprig or stem. Three parsley sprigs, two chervil sprigs and six chive stems amount to only a couple of tablespoons chopped, which is modest for three quarts of liquid; a generous double is closer to modern taste.
- Adding herbs earlyForty-five minutes of simmering will cook the freshness out of chives in particular. Add half with the potatoes as written and reserve half to stir in at the end with the butter.
- Skimming and the final butterLamb fat sets firm when cold, so if you can make the soup a day ahead the fat lifts off in a sheet. The half ounce of butter (one tablespoon) stirred in off the heat is for gloss and body, not flavour, and should not be allowed to boil.
- White pepperSpecified so no black flecks show in a pale broth. Half a teaspoon is assertive, and white pepper has a different, more musty character than black, so taste before adding it all.
Naming a soup for a city was standard practice in the grand-hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and The International Cook Book — compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York — is organised on exactly that principle: a world tour conducted through a French repertoire. This is essentially the Irish stew of mutton, potato and allium translated into potage form, thinned to three quarts and finished with butter in the French manner, with parsley, chervil and chives standing in for the fines herbes of a Paris kitchen. Mutton rather than lamb is the authentic note: sheep in Ireland and Britain are often said to have been kept largely for wool and slaughtered old, and the strong, fatty meat wanted long boiling and plenty of potato to soften it. The dish tells you less about Dublin than about how a professional American kitchen of 1906 catalogued the world's cooking — as a set of flavourings applied to a stock pot.