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Clear Game Soup
(Poland.) Cut up a calf's foot, add the bones and scraps and gravy of any cold game, duck, or rabbit, 2 ounces of chopped ham, 1 onion, 2 carrots, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, a bit of mace, and a piece of celery. Cook it with 2 quarts of water for 3 hours. Strain and clarify it with white of an egg, add salt, pepper, a glass of sherry, 1 hard-boiled egg, and 1 lemon, sliced.
A consommé built on game trimmings, with the calf's foot supplying the body that makes it worth clarifying at all. Everything depends on keeping the pot below a simmer.
- Never let it boilA rolling boil emulsifies fat and suspended protein into the liquid and no amount of egg white will pull it back out. Hold the pot at a bare shiver, one lazy bubble every few seconds, for the full three hours.
- The calf's footIt is there for gelatin, not flavour, and gives the finished soup its faint lip-sticking body. A butcher can usually order one; two split veal knuckles, a pig's trotter, or a pound of veal bones plus a little unflavoured gelatin off the heat will stand in.
- Game and its gravy"Cold game, duck, or rabbit" means leftovers he any any jailed roasting juices are the point: the picked carcass, skin, and any jellied roasting juices from the day before. If you are starting from raw bones instead, browning them in the oven first adds flavour, though it will also darken the broth.
- A glass of sherryIn turn-of-the-century usage this is a wineglass, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces. A dry amontillado or fino suits it; add it at the very end, off the heat, so the aroma is not driven off.
- A bit of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. One blade, or a scant pinch ground, is plenty for two quarts — it should read as warmth, not as spice.
- ClarifyingChill and lift off the fat first, then whisk one or two egg whites into the cold strained broth, bring it slowly to just under a simmer without stirring, and let the raft form and set for 10 minutes. Ladle the clear soup out through a cloth-lined sieve rather than pouring.
- Egg and lemonThese are garnish, added to the tureen or the individual bowls at the table. Slice the hard-boiled egg and the lemon thin; lemon left to sit in the hot soup turns bitter from the pith.
- YieldTwo quarts of water reduces to roughly a quart and a half, and the clarification costs a little more. Figure four to six cups as a first course.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around 1900: the collection of foreign household recipes gathered for American cooks who were beginning to travel, or to read about travelling. The Polish attribution is plausible enough in outline — clear meat broths, the rosół family, are a fixture of the Polish table, and a country with a long aristocratic hunting tradition produced plenty of ways to use up the bones of yesterday's duck or hare. What the recipe really documents, though, is the international consommé of the period. The method here — gelatinous foot, aromatic vegetables, long slow extraction, egg-white raft, a fortified wine at the finish — is French classical technique as codified in the nineteenth century, and it turns up under a dozen national labels in books of this kind. The garnish of sliced hard-boiled egg and lemon is the detail that carries some genuine local character; it is the sort of finish more at home in Central and Eastern Europe than in a Paris kitchen.