There are a thousand uses in an intelligently conducted kitchen for
the delicious bouillon in the stockpot, redolent of the flavors of
diverse vegetables and meats.
Dumas wrote that the French cuisine owes its superiority to the
excellence of its bouillon--the product of seven hours of continuous
simmering. He knew what he was talking about, for he was almost as far
famed for his knowledge of kitchen lore as for his novels; and his
"Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine" is one of the monumental contributions
to the arts of cooking and eating.
Another Frenchman, Ferdinand Grandi, wrote a book in 1902 entitled "Les
700 Potages, ou l'art de Préparer les Soupes, Consommés, Bisques,
Purées, Garbures, Semoules, Légumes, Farineux, Potages de toutes Sortes
et de tous les Pays."
Seven hundred soups seems a large order, yet it is possible to prepare
not only seven hundred but seven times seven hundred kinds by combining
the juices and flavors of diverse meats with those of an endless
variety of vegetables. That this is not an exaggeration any one may
convince himself by turning over the pages of Baumann's "Meisterwerk
der Speisen," which, in its 2016 pages, indicates the nature of about
that number of soups.
It must not be inferred from the foregoing remarks about the stockpot
that nothing goes into it except odds and ends--peelings and tops of
vegetables, bruised bones, trimmings from joints, scraps of poultry
or other meat that is left over at table. On the contrary, those who
can afford it put in chunks of carefully chosen meats to enrich the
bouillon.
For making the national French soup known as _pot-au-feu_ the pieces
generally selected are the top round, the shoulder, or the ends of
ribs. Preparing the pot-au-feu is not so simple a matter as it may
seem. In "L'Art du Bien Manger" we read that the boiling must be done
slowly and methodically and that the vegetables to be used must be
fresh:
"To make an excellent bouillon, cook, preferably in an earthenware
casserole, or, if that is not available, an iron pot; put in the meat,
the bones, cold water and salt. Put the pot on the fire, bring it to
the boiling point and skim carefully, then after this first skimming
add a glass of cold water. Let it boil up again and skim a second time.
When the soup begins again to boil slightly slacken the fire, uncover
the pot partially and let it simmer gently.
"After three hours' simmering add the vegetables and two pepper-corns.
Let this go on simmering two hours more. Color the liquid with a little
caramel made from burned sugar. Remove all the fat from the bouillon,
put it through a fine sieve and pour it into the soup tureen in which
you have placed thin slices of bread which have been browned in the
oven. The beef from the stock may be served garnished with the boiled
vegetables. (The use of pepper is a matter of taste.)
"The economical side of the pot-au-feu is to furnish soup for two
meals. What is left over may be kept in an earthenware jar into which
it should be poured through a fine sieve after it has settled somewhat
in the soup kettle."
Dumas, who relied for his culinary directions on his friend Vuillemot,
of the Tête Noire at St. Cloud, advises that only the freshest and
juiciest meat should be used and that it should not be washed, as
that would rob it of a portion of its juice. The bones that are added
should be broken up well with a mallet as that will result in the
gelatine being effectually extracted from them. "Then we place them
in a horsehair bag with any scraps of fowl, rabbit, partridge, or
roast pigeon which may be found in the larder; in fact, the remains of
yesterday's dinner."
As I am not writing a cook book, my main object in presenting these
excerpts is to provide an illustration of that use of brains and
painstaking care in the kitchen which explains French supremacy in
matters gastronomic.