Petite Marmite
This is the national soup of France, and just now very fashionable in first-class restaurants. It is always served in the earthen pot in which it is cooked, set on a fancy plate. Each mouthful should convey a distinct taste of a separate vegetable. The marmites are sold at the crockery stores in the French quarter, but an ordinary earthen Boston bean pot will answer equally well to serve it in. The stock can be first cooked in a large kettle, used for soups, every day. Cut up 6 pounds of beef and the shin bone, an old chicken,--which can be used for croquettes or salad,--2 large carrots, 2 leeks, and 2 turnips. Add 3 cloves, a bayleaf, some parsley, thyme, and sweet marioram, 1 gallon of water. Bring it to a boil, skim it, and let it simmer 8 hours. Take off the fat, clarify it, and use it for frying or braising. Add salt and pepper sparingly, set it away overnight, after straining it. To 1 quart of this, heated in the earthen pot, add 1 cup of sliced carrots, turnips, or string beans, cut thin and cooked. Also 4 slices of toasted bread or rolls. Using this recipe for stock--it is given by a reliable chef at one of the clubs--it will make 3 1/2 quarts, sufficient for a week; 1 pint a day, with the addition of milk or vegetables or any other thickening, will do for a small family. Such concentrated stock requires an equal amount of water in cooking a second time. It may also be used in making sauces.
A club chef's beef-and-fowl stock, then a service instruction: the finished soup is a quart of that stock with separately cooked vegetables dropped in. The two halves are worth treating separately.
- The hinge is cooking the vegetables apart"Each mouthful should convey a distinct taste of a separate vegetable" is the whole point of the dish, and it only works if the carrot, turnip and beans are cooked on their own to just tender and added to the hot stock at the last moment. Simmering them in the broth muddies them into a generic soup.
- An old chickenThis means a stewing hen or boiling fowl — a laying bird past its prime, tough but deeply flavoured. A supermarket roasting chicken has neither the collagen nor the taste; ask a butcher for a fowl, or substitute 2 lb of chicken wings and backs, which are gelatinous enough to do similar work.
- The shin boneBeef shin with its bone gives the gelatine that makes this stock set to a jelly overnight. Have the butcher saw it into rounds so the marrow and cut bone surfaces are exposed.
- Eight hours, and the yieldA gallon of water yielding 3 1/2 quarts after eight hours implies very little evaporation: a gentle simmer, largely covered, never a boil — boiling emulsifies fat back into the liquid and clouds it. Keep the surface barely trembling and skim in the first half hour, when most of the scum rises.
- "Clarify the fat"Not the stock: the fat lifted off the chilled stock is melted, any water and sediment let settle out, and the clean dripping kept for frying. It is beef fat with chicken fat in it and keeps for weeks refrigerated.
- Storing a week's worthThe instruction to make enough for a week assumes a cold larder and daily reboiling. Refrigerate the strained stock and use it within four days, or freeze it in pint portions. Cool it quickly — decant into shallow containers rather than leaving a full kettle to sit warm for hours.
- Salt sparingly is meant literallyThe stock is concentrated and the recipe expects it to be diluted with an equal volume of water on second use, or extended with milk and vegetables. Season the finished bowl, not the kettle.
- The potA marmite is simply the earthenware stockpot the soup takes its name from; a Boston bean pot or any glazed stoneware crock of about a quart works. Unless it is flameware, heat the stock in a saucepan and pour it into a warmed pot to serve rather than setting the crock over a burner.
- ServingA quart with vegetables and four slices of toast serves four as a first course. Grated cheese is often handed separately with this soup in France, though this recipe does not call for it.
Petite marmite means "little pot," and the name belongs to the vessel rather than the soup — the earthenware crock in which the broth is cooked and carried straight to the table, a habit that comes out of the French pot-au-feu, the long-simmered beef and vegetable dinner of ordinary households. Its move into first-class restaurants in the late nineteenth century is exactly what this entry records: a peasant method dressed up, served in its rustic pot set on a fancy plate, the rusticity itself now the fashionable part. The economy underneath is unchanged and is spelled out here without embarrassment — the beef and the boiled fowl come out for croquettes and salad, the fat is clarified for frying, the stock stretches across a week and does duty in sauces. The note that the marmites can be bought "in the French quarter" places the writer in an American city with an established French trade, and the deference to "a reliable chef at one of the clubs" is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which borrowed freely from professional kitchens and named the source as a guarantee of quality.