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Potage, Togo
Cut half a boned fowl, quarter pound raw lean veal and quarter pound raw lean mutton in half-inch-square pieces. Place in a saucepan with one ounce butter and cook ten minutes, stirring once in a while; moisten with two and a half quarts water and one quart broth; season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon pepper and half teaspoon curry powder. Thoroughly clean the other half fowl and add to the soup with two chopped onions, and two chopped seedless green peppers. Lightly mix and boil thirty-five minutes, then add two ounces raw rice and boil forty-five minutes more. Remove the half fowl, add one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley to the soup; boil five minutes longer. Skim fat from surface of soup, pour it into a tureen and serve.
A three-meat clear soup built on a whole fowl, half of it diced into the pot and half poached whole and lifted out. It is straightforward, but the proportions and one of the timings need thought.
- What a fowl isA fowl is a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a broiler, usually 4 to 6 lb. A supermarket stewing hen is the closest match; a standard roasting chicken will work but gives a thinner broth and will be done well before the times given.
- "Half a boned fowl"Bone one half of the bird and cut that meat into half-inch dice. The other half goes in on the bone and is fished out later. Add the carcass bones from the boned half to the pot for body, and remove them with the half fowl.
- The liquidTwo and a half quarts water plus one quart broth is 14 cups, which is a great deal for the solids listed. Expect it to reduce over the eighty-five minutes of boiling; if it does not, the soup will be thin. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which clouds the broth and shreds the meat.
- Rice timingTwo ounces (about a third of a cup) of raw rice boiled forty-five minutes and then five more will collapse entirely. That may be intentional here, as it lightly thickens the broth, but for distinct grains add the rice about twenty minutes before serving instead.
- Seedless green peppersThis means ordinary green bell peppers with the core and seeds removed, not a chilli variety. The heat in the dish comes only from the half teaspoon of curry powder.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon across fourteen cups of liquid is a background note, not a flavour. Curry powders of this period were often milder and tended to lean on turmeric and coriander, unlike many jars sold now; taste at the end before adding more.
- The removed half fowlThe recipe discards it without comment. Pull the meat while warm and either return some to the tureen or keep it for another dish; it will be fully cooked and still worth eating.
- SkimmingSkim through the cooking, not only at the end. Chilling the finished soup and lifting the set fat gives a much clearer result if you can make it a day ahead.
- YieldGenerously eight to ten servings as a first course.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long the chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter carries names drawn from cities, patrons and public figures of the day. "Togo" is generally taken to refer to Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, whose victory at Tsushima in 1905 made him briefly one of the best-known men in the world outside Japan, and the faint touch of curry powder is the sort of gesture toward "the Orient" that restaurant kitchens of the period used to justify such a name; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and Togoland, then a German colony, is an alternative reading. Nothing about the soup is Japanese. What it does show clearly is that one bird serves two purposes: half diced into the pot for substance, half poached whole in the same broth and lifted out again.