Home › The World's Kitchen › Potage, Montglas
Potage, Montglas
Cut off head, neatly draw and wipe a fowl of about three and a half to four pounds. Place in a saucepan with a carrot, turnip, onion with a clove stuck in it, two leeks, two branches each parsley and celery, and a half-pound piece salt pork. Pour in five quarts water, season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, cover pan and let slowly boil for two and a half hours, being careful to skim off fat once in a while. Strain broth through cheesecloth into another saucepan, let it come to a boil, then dredge in two ounces tapioca. Cut in small squares one ounce cooked lean ham, one ounce each cooked smoked beef tongue and macaroni, add to broth with tapioca and carefully mix. Boil for fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while, then pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear fowl broth thickened with tapioca and garnished with the classic Montglas trio of tongue, ham and pasta. The work is all in the stock; the garnish takes minutes.
- The birdA "fowl" here means a mature stewing hen, which gives far more gelatin and flavour than a young roaster. A 3.5-4 lb chicken works, but look for a hen or add a few wings and feet if you want the broth to have body. Modern birds arrive drawn, so ignore the first sentence.
- Five quarts is the pointFive quarts is deliberately generous, and some will go off in the long simmer; do not top it up. With the pan covered as directed the loss is modest, so expect a good deal of finished broth — enough for a large table.
- "Slowly boil" means barely simmeringA true boil will emulsify the fat and cloud the broth beyond rescue. Hold it at a bare tremble, uncovered or with the lid ajar, and skim as directed. The instruction to cover is worth ignoring for the sake of clarity.
- Salt pork and the saltSalt pork varies a great deal in how much salt it carries, so taste before committing to the full tablespoon. Adding it towards the end, after the pork has given up what it will, guards against a brackish broth once the liquid has reduced.
- Dredging in the tapioca"Dredge" means to sprinkle in a slow rain while stirring, using fine or small pearl tapioca. Dumping it in gives a lump at the bottom of the pan. Two ounces is about 1/3 cup; large pearl tapioca will not soften in fifteen minutes.
- The garnish is already cookedHam, tongue and macaroni all go in cooked and cut to a uniform small dice, about 1/4 inch, so they arrive in the spoon together. They are there to heat through, not to cook; the fifteen minutes belongs to the tapioca.
- Smoked tongueCooked beef tongue is still sold at Latin American and kosher butchers and is worth seeking out for the correct flavour. Failing that, more ham, or a little cooked smoked brisket, is a defensible substitute.
- Strain properlyCheesecloth in a sieve, and let the broth drip rather than pressing the vegetables through. Chill it if you have time and lift the fat off solid before finishing the soup.
Montglas is one of the fixed garnishes of nineteenth-century French cookery: a salpicon usually described as pickled tongue, mushrooms, truffle and foie gras, most often bound in a sauce for vol-au-vents and used to dress everything from chicken to eggs. The name is generally traced to the Marquis or Comtesse de Montglas, French court figures of the seventeenth century, though the attribution belongs to kitchen tradition rather than to any document; Escoffier lists the garnish without explaining it. What appears here is the thrifty soup version, with macaroni among the ingredients and tapioca doing the thickening. A potage of this kind was expected to be lightly bound and perfectly limpid at the same time, and this recipe's insistence on skimming, straining and slow cooking is the whole technique of that style in miniature.