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You Need a Good Bouilli

A Winter Broth

To get a really good bouillon, you need a bouilli. The

trouble is we don’t do bouilli anymore. Put your hand on

your heart and tell me when you last ate a piece of boiled

meat. No? I thought not. Unless it’s an egg, we just don’t

do ‘boiled’ anymore. Vegetables are ‘blanched’ or steamed,

meat is seared or ‘pan-roasted’ or, very occasionally,

‘poached’, and fish is much the same – although that is,

perhaps, less surprising. Once I had found ‘boiled carp in

grey sauce’ in a Polish cookbook, I knew I had reached

the nadir of unappetising dishes. However, boiled meat

is different: it’s just getting over that ‘boiled’ word.

Boiling certain cuts of meat – usually dry, lean cuts

such as silverside or brisket of beef – produces both a

succulent piece of meat, the bouilli, and a beautiful,

flavoursome broth, or bouillon. It is a win-win situation.

You eat slices of the meat with some vegetables that have

also been cooked in the broth and add a few punchy

condiments such as mustard, horseradish, salsa verde,

cornichons and other pickles and have a very good dinner.

Later you come to the broth.

I never agree that a good soup always has to have a

good stock. There are many that don’t. In my view, the

lovely freshness of a good minestrone should come from

the flavour of the vegetables alone; no cream soup or purée

needs a stock as that too would get in the way of the purity

of flavour – be it watercress, cauliflower or whatever. But

there are also soups that are truly meagre affairs when

they do not have the support of a good broth.

I make a lot of soups at home. Sometimes that is all

one wants for supper. They are never posh soups, such as

consommés or silky-smooth purées (I do not even possess

a blender, not in working order at any rate), but simple

soups, sometimes, although not always, stock based –

usually beef or chicken, sometimes a mixture of the two

– and fairly well packed with vegetables. The vegetables

are always, I hope, judiciously chosen but there is often an

element of tidying up the fridge involved, too: those last

two carrots and that half head of cabbage ought to go

somewhere, after all.

15

January