French Provincial Cooking (34 page)

 

Turn off the heat and lift out all the solids. If the beef is to be served hot put it in a covered dish and keep it warm. Spread a wet cloth in a colander and strain the broth through it into a large bowl or soup tureen. Extract the marrow from the marrow bone and spread it on pieces of French bread baked golden in the oven. Remove as much fat as possible from the broth by means of absorbent kitchen paper or thick paper tissues laid on top and gathered up as soon as each has become saturated with the grease. Taste the broth and see if it needs more salt; if so, add it only to that portion of the broth which is now to be served; the rest, if needed for stock or sauces, may have to be reduced, and must not therefore be made any more salt. The leeks and carrots from the
pot-au-feu
are sometimes chopped and handed separately with the soup, as there will not be enough to go with the beef, for which fresh ones, including potatoes, should have been cooked separately. With the beef serve also pickled gherkins, coarse salt, horseradish sauce, capers, mustard, a vinaigrette dressing or any of the usual accompaniments of beef.

Alternatively, and the better method perhaps when the
pot-au-feu
is an occasional dish rather than a weekly occurrence, time the cooking so that the beef will be ready by lunch or dinner-time, but leave the strained broth to get cold until next day, so that all fat can be very easily removed. (Keep it, for it is good for sauté potatoes or fried bread.) Also remove the meat from the veal bone, season it with oil and salt, and next day cut it in strips and dress it with a well-seasoned sauce of chopped shallots, parsley, capers, oil and vinegar and serve it as an hors-d’œuvre. The ox liver is pussy’s share of the
pot-au-feu,
at any rate in my house.

 

Salad from the boiled beef is, I think, one of the most delicious of dishes; sometimes called
salade parisienne,
it is thinly sliced beef arranged in alternate layers with boiled potatoes, each layer well soaked in a highly flavoured dressing of oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, pepper, chopped capers, shallots, pickled cucumber and a large quantity of parsley. The shallots and parsley should be very, very finely chopped, so that the finished result is more like a thick sauce than a salad dressing. The salad is garnished with hard-boiled eggs and sometimes tomatoes, and is served on its own as an hors-d’œuvre.

The
bouilli
is also used in France to make the rissoles which they call
boulettes
de
viande
(French rissoles being minced meat enclosed in pastry), the croquettes, the hashed beef and potatoes familiar to our own kitchens, as well as the famous
bœuf miroton
in which the sliced beef is heated up with sliced onions, very slowly, in a little of the thickened broth. One way of using ox-tail cooked in the
pot-au-feu
is to coat the pieces with breadcrumbs and grill them as described on page 350.

 

If to be kept, the broth should be brought to the boil every day in hot weather, every two days in winter, returned to a clean bowl, and covered when it is cold, not before. Vegetables left in any stock will make it turn sour very rapidly, and so will the system of leaving it in a saucepan over the stove while the oven is on or on the side of the range overnight. If the stock is kept in a refrigerator be sure that it is covered, or it may freeze solid like a water-ice and be ruined.

 

There are any amount of regional variations of the
pot-au-feu,
the chief differences being in the kind of meat used. One of the best is the old Provençal recipe, in which a piece of lamb or mutton replaces a proportion of the beef and in which the seasonings include garlic, juniper berries and a small proportion of white wine. The meat, I need hardly add, is served with olives and capers, and traditionally, a salad of chick peas, the making of which is described on page 137.

Cold, next day, an
aïoli
may go with it, while the lamb makes good stuffing for aubergines and tomatoes. This Provençal
pot-au-feu
is excellent, but not everybody cares for the taste of mutton in the broth, which also restricts its uses from the point of view of stocks and sauces.

It is not often, in a small household, that stock is made especially for soups. It is rather for occasions when stock, perhaps from boiled beef, veal bones, a duck, chicken or turkey carcase, happens to be available that one wants to know how to use it to the best advantage. Three or four of the soups in this chapter do need stock, but for the majority of vegetable soups it is not necessary. When it is essential, and none is available, it is safe enough to use a chicken
bouillon
cube, always remembering that these are already salted. They add, of course, nothing to the consistency of the soup, only to the flavour, and if the use of them becomes a habit then your soups will inevitably begin to taste monotonous. Most of us remember how every stock or soup, stew and sauce during the days of rationing tended to have the same background taste because bacon bones and bacon rinds were the mainstay of stock-making.

When making stock from chicken or turkey carcases upon which little meat is left, there are two points to be made. First, use them quickly, without waiting for them to get dried up and stale. Second, it is a mistake to cook them too long, or a strong and unpleasant flavour of bone will result (this is what makes pressure-cooked stocks so horrible) and they will be cloudy. Whenever possible it is a great improvement to add a small proportion of raw veal or beef to such stocks.

For occasions when stock has to be made specially for a soup, here is a recipe for a small quantity.

Put
lb. of chopped stewing veal, a small carrot, a small unpeeled onion, a clove of garlic, a chopped tomato, a bouquet of herbs and a little salt into a saucepan, with 1
pints of water. Bring to simmering point, skim, then transfer the pot to a low oven for about an hour. Strain through a fine sieve. There should be 1
pints of clear stock, which will add body and richness to soups but will not overwhelm other flavours.

One stewing partridge,
lb. stewing veal, carrots, onions, celery, a tomato, pork or bacon dripping, parsley.

Fry a sliced onion in a little melted pork or bacon fat. When browned, add the roughly chopped veal, and let it brown slightly. Add salt, pepper, 3 or 4 carrots, a whole small unpeeled onion, a chopped tomato, a small piece of celery, some parsley stalks. On top put the partridge, pour over 2 pints of cold water, simmer extremely gently for 3
to 4 hours. Strain off the liquid and leave it to get quite cold, when it will be easy to skim off the fat. There will be a strong clear consommé which should not need clarifying, and which has only to be reheated. A stewing pheasant or a couple of pigeons can also be used for this consommé.

Use the bird or birds which have been cooked in the soup to make a little cold dish. Cut them in half, put them in a small earthenware terrine; in a saucepan heat 2 tablespoons of the consommé, season it well, stir in 2 oz. of butter, and when it has melted pour it over the partridge and serve very cold, garnished with sliced hard-boiled eggs and watercress.

This is a rough kind of
pot-au-feu,
in which either bacon or salt pork, depending upon which part of the province you are in, replaces the usual beef. Personally, I prefer to use salt pork or unsmoked bacon. The smoked variety gives the broth too powerful a flavour.

Having obtained a 2-2
lb. square-cut piece of breast of salt pork, and soaked it in cold water for two or three hours, cover it with fresh water and bring gently to the boil. After 5 minutes’ boiling, throw away this first lot of water, put back the bacon in the saucepan with 10-12 carrots, the same number of potatoes, 2 onions and 2 leeks tied together with a sprig of parsley, a bayleaf, thyme, a piece of celery and a piece of garlic. Season with pepper, and cover with about 4 pints of water. Bring very gradually to an almost imperceptible boil. Skim. Continue cooking very gently for 1
hours; 30 minutes before serving add the heart of a small white cabbage, cut in half and previously blanched for 5 minutes in boiling water; 10 minutes later add a cupful of shelled broad beans and the same of green peas.