Bouillon
Four pounds of beef; five pounds of veal; one chicken. Season highly with cayenne, celery seed and salt; a little dash of tabasco sauce. Add six quarts of water and cook slowly five hours. Remove the chicken when tender. Keep the stock in a cool place and simply heat it when required after removing the fat from the top. Serve in cups with a slice of lemon in each cup.
A clear, highly seasoned meat broth meant to be made in quantity, chilled, and reheated by the cup. The proportions are generous by modern standards and the method is simple, but a few points need translating.
- ScaleFour pounds of beef, five of veal and a whole chicken in six quarts of water will finish well short of six quarts after five hours; something like four to four and a half quarts, or roughly sixteen to eighteen cups, depending on how hard it simmers and whether the pot is covered. Halving everything is reasonable for a modern household.
- Cut the meat for flavor, not for eatingThe book does not specify cuts. Use beef shin or chuck and veal shank or knuckle; the connective tissue and marrow are what give the broth body. Meat sold for roasting or grilling wastes money here.
- "Cook slowly" means a bare simmerThe surface should barely tremble, around 185-195F. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock, which defeats the point of a bouillon served clear in a cup.
- Skim before you seasonBring the pot up slowly and lift the gray scum off in the first half hour. Adding the cayenne, celery seed and salt after skimming keeps you from throwing seasoning away.
- Salt with the reduction in mindFive hours of slow cooking concentrates the liquid considerably. Season lightly at the start and adjust at the end, or the finished broth will be inedibly salty.
- Remove the chicken when tenderRoughly 60 to 90 minutes, well before the five hours are up. The meat is worth keeping for salad or croquettes; return the carcass to the pot for the remaining time.
- Cooling and keeping"A cool place" was a larder or icebox. Cool the strained broth quickly in a shallow pan or an ice bath, then refrigerate; the fat sets in a solid cap that lifts off cleanly. It keeps four days refrigerated, several months frozen.
- ServingBouillon cups are small, generally holding something in the range of six to eight ounces. The recipe puts the lemon slice in the cup at serving, not in the pot.
Bouillon in American cookbooks around 1900 sat somewhere between a soup and a tonic. It was poured from a kettle at afternoon receptions, handed round in two-handled bouillon cups at the start of a formal dinner, and pressed on invalids as nourishment when nothing solid would do; the beef-tea and beef-extract trade of the same decades traded on exactly that reputation. The veal here is doing structural work rather than flavoring, since veal knuckle gives gelatin without much taste, and the chicken rounds out what beef alone leaves harsh. What might be taken to mark this as a turn-of-the-century American recipe rather than a French one is the seasoning: cayenne, celery seed and a dash of Tabasco, the last a Louisiana product that had been on the market since 1868.