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Potage, San Diego
Place in a large saucepan a two-pound piece of beef from the short ribs, a piece beef marrow bone, a carrot cut in quarters, a turnip, two medium onions with a clove stuck in each, two leeks and one stalk well-cleaned celery. Moisten with four quarts water, season with a light tablespoon salt, one teaspoon whole black pepper, and add two bay leaves. Place pan on fire, and as soon as it comes to a boiling point skim fat off surface, then let simmer for two hours and a half, being careful to skim off fat once in a while. Strain broth through a damp double cheesecloth into another saucepan, add two ounces raw rice, with half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and leaves from one branch chervil. Boil for twenty minutes, then add four ounces seeded California raisins, lightly mix and boil for ten minutes. Remove, cut carrots, turnip and celery in small pieces, place in a soup tureen, pour soup over and serve.
A clear beef broth finished with rice and raisins, the sweetness standing in for the California fruit the name nods at. Nothing here is difficult, but the broth is the whole dish and it rewards patience with the skimmer.
- Skim, then keep skimmingBring the pot only to a bare tremble once the first scum is off; a rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and no amount of straining will clear it afterward. Skim every twenty minutes or so during the two and a half hours.
- Quantities and yieldFour quarts of water simmered for two and a half hours will reduce by some amount, depending on the pot and how gently it is held; the loss is not predictable from the text. The book gives no yield, and the broth is meant to be light rather than concentrated.
- A light tablespoon of saltThat means a level or slightly under-filled tablespoon for four quarts; depending on the crystal, that is somewhere between about 10 and 18 g. Salt at the start as written, then correct at the end once the liquid has reduced.
- Rice timingTwo ounces of raw long-grain rice cooks in the twenty minutes given; the further ten minutes with the raisins takes it to thirty, at which point it will be soft and slightly broken. If you want distinct grains, add the rice ten minutes later than directed and let the raisins go in on schedule.
- ChervilFresh chervil is seldom stocked outside farmers' markets. A branch is a small sprig, and its faint anise note is the point; a pinch of tarragon plus extra parsley is the closest substitute, though not the same thing.
- Whole peppercornsA teaspoon of whole black pepper goes in with the meat and is caught by the cheesecloth at straining. Do not substitute ground pepper, which will cloud the broth and cannot be removed.
- The marrow boneAsk a butcher for a cut canoe or cross-cut marrow bone. The marrow will largely melt out over two and a half hours and adds to the fat you are skimming, along with the short ribs; that is expected.
- The boiled beefThe recipe returns the vegetables to the tureen but says nothing about the short ribs. Two pounds of well-simmered beef is a second meal — serve it warm with coarse salt, mustard and pickles in the French pot-au-feu manner.
Potage is simply the French word for soup, and its use here signals the kitchen this book came out of: professional, French-trained, American-based. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, wrote in the era when hotel and restaurant cooks routinely attached place names to standard preparations, and The International Cook Book is full of dishes labelled for American cities, states and public figures. The San Diego attribution rests on the seeded California raisins stirred into the finished broth — raisin growing in the San Joaquin Valley had made the state's dried fruit a national grocery item by the early 1900s. The underlying soup is an ordinary French pot-au-feu broth: beef, marrow bone, root vegetables, leek, clove-studded onion, strained clear and garnished. Sweet fruit in a savoury meat broth is older than either country and common across Persian and North African cooking; here it arrives without any documented San Diego tradition behind it.