Yellow Bouillon, Basic, Medium Strength

History

Molokhovets opens her book with bulon, the clear meat broth she treats as the foundation of nearly all her clear soups, cross-referencing 'Bouillon No. 1' throughout and calling her two basic yellow bouillons the base of every other clear soup. Both the vocabulary and the method are French: bouillon derives from the French bouillir, 'to boil,' while consommé — the concentrated, clarified form — comes from French consommer (Latin consummare, 'to complete'), a term fixed by the late 17th century for a strong, clarified broth of well-cooked meat. This framework reached Russian kitchens through a long importation of French cooks: from Peter the Great's reign the nobility hired foreign, largely French chefs, and it was under Peter that the very word sup ('soup') entered Russian, displacing the older pokhlyobka. Those chefs brought precise formulation and refined technique, reorganizing gentry cooking on French lines. Molokhovets records rather than invents this system: her clarification — the ottyazhka of lean minced beef and beaten egg whites that coagulates into a raft trapping every impurity — is the standard French method Soyer had codified by 1846 and that Escoffier and Saulnier later catalogued into more than a hundred named consommés, and she likewise appends dozens of garnishes to her basic bouillon.

Ingredients

• funt beef, from the thigh
• stakans cold water
• tsp salt
• onion
• carrot
• parsley root
• celeriac
• leek
• turnip
• funt potato
• herb bundle
• fresh dill

Instructions

1. Rinse beef without wringing; place in pot with ~15 stakans cold water.
2. Bring to a boil three times over high heat, skimming each time; strain, wash pot, return meat and broth, salt.
3. Halve and brown the cut faces of onion, carrot, parsley, celeriac, leek; add with remaining roots and a herb bundle.
4. Simmer gently 2–3 hours until reduced; settle, skim fat, strain again through a napkin, reheat and adjust salt.
5. Serve over chopped dill or use as the base for other clear soups.