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Potage, Westmoreland
Place in a medium-sized saucepan a mirepoix. Add one pound veal parings or bones, cut into small pieces; add one ounce fresh-salted pork, cut into very small pieces and one ounce butter. Place the pan on a lively fire, stir well with a wooden spoon and cook to a nice brown for fifteen minutes, carefully mixing frequently to avoid burning at the bottom. Add two ounces flour; stir well while cooking for ten minutes. Moisten with three quarts hot broth or hot water, adding one pint fresh or canned tomatoes, finely crushed. Season with a light tablespoon salt and two saltspoons cayenne pepper. Then as soon as it comes to a boil add one well-cleaned raw calf's foot. Cover the pan and slowly boil for one and a half hours. Remove the calf's foot, bone it thoroughly, then cut the meat into small, square pieces. Cut also twelve small pickles into same shape, place the two articles in a rather small saucepan and strain the broth through a fine Chinese strainer into the pan with the meat and pickles. Set the pan on the fire, pour in half gill sherry and one tablespoon brandy and let boil gently for thirty minutes. Skim the fat from the surface of the soup, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A brown veal soup thickened with roux and body from a calf's foot, finished with sherry, brandy and diced pickles. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the ingredients need translating and one of the timings is short.
- MirepoixIn books of this period it usually means diced carrot and onion with celery and aromatics such as bay, thyme and peppercorns, though the exact composition varies from author to author. For a soup on this scale, about a cup of diced vegetables total.
- Fresh-salted porkLightly cured, unsmoked pork belly — salt pork that has been in the brine only a short time. Modern salt pork or unsmoked pancetta works; blanch it a minute if it tastes aggressively salty, since the recipe already adds a tablespoon of salt.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon — assertive but not extreme in three quarts. Half a gill is a quarter cup of sherry.
- The calf's footIts main job is gelatin: it gives the soup its clinging body. The meat is used too, boned and cut into small squares as the garnish. Ask a butcher to split one, or substitute a pound of veal knuckle plus a split pig's foot. Scrub it well before it goes in.
- Give the foot longerAn hour and a half at a slow boil may be enough to bone the foot, but if it does not come apart easily give it more time at a gentle simmer; check that the bones slip free before you pull it out.
- Lively fireMedium-high heat for the browning stage. The roux and the vegetables should go a deep nut brown over the full twenty-five minutes — that colour is the whole flavour of the soup, so do not rush it and do not let the flour scorch.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve lined with a single layer of damp cheesecloth gives the same result.
- PicklesSmall sour cucumber pickles — cornichons or gherkins, not sweet ones. Twelve is about a third of a cup diced; they are cooked thirty minutes and will soften considerably, which is intended.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid reduces to roughly two and a half after simmering: eight to ten first-course servings. Skim the fat thoroughly at the end, as browned veal and salt pork throw a good deal.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter follows the hotel convention of the day: a French base name, potage, followed by a proper noun that signals nothing more than a particular garnish or finish. Westmorland was an English county in the Lake District, absorbed into Cumbria in 1974, and there is no evidence the soup was ever eaten there — the name is a menu label, of a piece with the dozens of similarly christened potages, sauces and garnishes that let a large kitchen file its variations. What the recipe does belong to is a real and older tradition: the English and Anglo-American family of soups in which gelatinous meat from the calf is diced small, bound in a dark roux, sharpened with pickles and lifted with sherry and brandy to stand in for the richness of green turtle. The calf's foot did the work that powdered gelatin and stock concentrate do now, and its near-disappearance from butchers' counters is one reason soups like this one dropped out of the repertoire.