The spirit of cookery

There can be little doubt that these processes given under the title of pot-au-feu were designed more with a view of obtaining a considerable quantity of well-tasting thin broth, made attractive by masses of vegetables and green condiments, than that of preparing a well-tasting piece of beef ; for the boiling during four hours of lb. of meat in fourfifths of a gallon (8 lb.) of water cannot possibly give an attractive result. The great fault of the recipes, then, is the excess of water in which the relative quantities of meat are to be boiled. If each quantity of meat were boiled in an equal weight of water, a much better result would be obtained as regards the broth as well as the meat. The consequence of this false practice has been that this boiled fresh beef, which the French term botcilli, has fallen into great and entirely undeserved disrepute. Thirty years ago every dinner in a good private house or hotel on the Continent began with soup, and upon this followed the boiled beef ; at the present time the boiled beef is rarely met with. No doubt the beef was not always prime, or the meat was from a cow or heifer, and pale and tasteless ; but these aberrations detract nothing from the excellent quality of a well-boiled side, or rib, of beef. No doubt also that book-lore, which the travelling public partly forms its opiniou by, had a share in this change. Thus Brillat- Savarin wrote that bouilli was a wholesome, digestible nutriment, but of small restorative power, as it had lost some of the animalizable juices by boiling. He describes four categories of benighted persons who eat bouilli, while professors (of the physiology of taste, we suppose) never eat it, because it is flesh without its jidce. The assertion that a wholesome, digestible nutriment possessed small restorative power would be physiologically speaking untenable. But what the writer meant by restorative power was not the mere food-value, but the value of the pleasure of the good taste of the morsel as well. As applicable to the result of Gouff^’s recipes we agree with Savarin, and advise our readers to supplant these recipes by better ones. Instantaneous Broths, or Bouillon a la Minute. The same author, Gouff6, who has given such elaborate directions for the “pot-au-fev,, brings under the chapter on soups (p. 51) a recipe for instantaneous broth, or Bouillon à la Minute, which is in so far phenomenal, as it accomplishes, not in a minute or instantaneously, but in twenty minutes or half an hour, what other recipes do in four or five hours only — e.cj., in cases of illness — where, as Gouffe says, expense is a secondary question. Cut up 1 lb. (kilo) of very lean beef (gravy-beef) and half a boned chicken ; pound all well, put it into a casserole with 10 grs. of salt, pour over it 1^ litre, or 3 pints, of water, and heat to boiling while stirring. As soon as the boiling has commenced, add shred carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and celery ; boil for twenty minutes, and pass through a cloth. This is a perfectly rational proceeding : bones are omitted, fat is excluded, the meat is comminuted and perfectly exhausted, the boiling is confined to twenty minutes. This is, indeed, the process to be applied for the production of broth of unvarying strength. If the beef be omitted, I'EAL GRAVY-BROTH