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By Root 2262 0

the major part of its savour to the broth. Most cooks and housewives know that the making of a good broth entails care both in the selection of meat and vegetables and in the very slow cooking, but often suppose that the French pot-au-feu holds some other special secret which eludes them. This is understandable, because recipes for pot-au-feu are apt to make such heavy weather out of a very simple process. Lengthy explanations in chemical terms and paragraphs of quotation from Brillat Savarin jumbled up with romantic folklore about generations of French housewives conjuring magic out of their venerable earthenware pots cause the English reader, who tends to be more interested in the hows than the whys of cookery, to abandon the whole mystery and revert to his own methods, right or wrong.

Another possible reason for the rejection of the French method is that when in England we wish to eat boiled beef, the preference goes to salted silverside or brisket which, properly prepared and cooked, is after all one of our best culinary assets, and superior in many ways to an ordinary piece of beef boiled in the pot-au-feu. On the other hand it is obvious that stock from salt beef is no use for consommés or sauces, whereas in the case of the pot-au-feu the broth, apart from its qualities as a soup, plays an important part in enriching the dishes and sauces of French household cookery, giving them savour and body and taking the place of that indeterminate liquid from the stock-pot, the making of which at one time was thought to be the height of good management in an English kitchen. The editors of the 1891 Mrs. Beeton (not Mrs. Beeton herself) told their readers that ‘everything in the way of meat, bones, gravies and flavourings that would otherwise be wasted should go into the stock-pot, ‘shankbone of mutton, gravy left when the half-eaten leg was moved to another dish, trimmings of beefsteak that went into a pie, remains of gravies, bacon rinds and bones, poultry giblets, bones of roast meat, scraps of vegetables . . . nothing is too insignificant to be useful . . . such a pot in most houses should be always on the fire.’ Such instruction was the absolute negation of the principles of good cookery. All these miscellaneous leavings could not produce a stock with a true, fresh flavour, nor could it ever be clear and limpid because all the bacon bones and thickened gravies would cloud it, even if the cook were to stand all day over the pot skimming it; twice-cooked vegetables contribute nothing to a stock; nor would it have any strength because there is no raw, fresh meat to give out its juices and flavour. The gospel of the everlasting stock-pot (with a tap like a tea urn so that you could draw off the requisite amount of the fluid when required) is, I think, no longer preached or believed—many of us found out during rationing what a thankless task it was trying to coax stock out of skin and bone and scraps—and in fact I have only referred to it in order to highlight the difference between this fictional, or dustbin method, and the proper system of obtaining good broth.

The Choice of Meat for the Pot-au-feu

Briefly, the cuts of meat which are most satisfactory from the points of view of both bouillon and bouilli, as the beef is called in its cooked state, are the forequarter flank (plat de côtes)15 which is relatively cheap, a good shape, and emerges reasonably moist even after lengthy cooking, and if this is considered too fat, then a cut from the thick flank called in French the tranche grasse which corresponds to top rump in English terms; alternatively, a piece of silverside (gîte à la noix), or a cut from the shoulder near the blade-bone, known in French as the paleron, but of which there is no precise English equivalent. Shin, because of its gelatinous qualities, is good for the bouillon but produces an indifferent bouilli and is in any case not sufficient in itself alone to produce a good bouillon Some cooks advocate the use of equal proportions of two different cuts, such as silverside and shin, which is a good plan for