French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [93]
The serving
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.
To use up the Beef from the Pot-au-feu
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.
To store the Broth
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.
Provençal Variation