Pothofeo

Initially, sweat was made during the cold season, when a fireplace was constantly burning in the house. A pot was hung over the fire in which the dish was being cooked continuously: instead of the ingredients eaten, new ones were added all the time.

Potofye, like any "popular" dish, does not have a clear list of ingredients. In one or another ratio, it includes:

• inexpensive portions of beef carcass (shank, rump), preferably rich in gelatin, to avoid drying out during cooking (for example, knuckle);
• cartilaginous parts: oxtails or brain bones;
• vegetables: carrots, turnips, leeks, potatoes, celery, onions, cabbage, and sometimes mushrooms or wild mushrooms (the most diverse part of the composition, strongly depends on the region and season);
• spices: garni bouquet , salt, black pepper, cloves.

Onions before adding often fried (or scorched on an open fire) to blackness - this gives the broth a special color and flavor.

Broth is served separately (which distinguishes sweat from other dishes with a similar method of preparation and does not allow, strictly speaking, to call it soup ) and is often seasoned with rice, noodles or croutons . Also, the broth is used as a basis for sauces and for the preparation of other dishes.

Bone marrow is eaten on toast.

To the main course - meat and vegetables - they serve coarse salt, horseradish, Dijon mustard , and sometimes - pickled cucumbers and mayonnaise.

In Alsace, the remnants of meat and broth are used to make the traditional meat pie, Fleischnak .

Potofye is almost a symbol of "home" French cuisine - as an inexpensive, practical, hearty dish, the whole family is going to prepare and use. At the same time, the dish must be cooked for an extremely long time, so that today it can be found more often in restaurants than at home.

Renowned French chef Raymond Blanc Calls the sweat "the quintessence of French home cooking, the most popular dish in France. It does honor to the table of both the rich and the poor ” ^[1] .

In the French classics, sweets are, in the first place, the food of not rich burghers:

When she sat down to dine at a round table covered with a three-day freshness with a tablecloth, opposite her husband, and he, removing the lid from the soup bowl, announced joyfully: “Aha, soup with cabbage! Nothing could be better! .. ”- she dreamed of fine dinners, of sparkling silver, of tapestries adorning the walls with heroes of antiquity and fabulous birds in the more often enchanting forest; she dreamed of exquisite dishes served in fine china, of courtesies whispering in her ear and listening with a mysterious smile, touching with a fork pink trout meat or a wing of a hazel grouse.

- Guy de Maupassant . " Necklace "

Very much the poor can get out of the way:

“Sir,” she said, when the owner came the second time, having already locked the orchard gate, “would you like to bring broth to the table once a week - on the occasion of your arrival ...”
- Okay.
- We'll have to run into the meat.
- It is not necessary at all: you boil us broth from poultry, farmers will give you work. So I tell Cornaya to shoot me ravens. From ravens comes out the best broth in the world.

- Honore de Balzac . "Eugene Grande"

In both cases, instead of the “soup” and “broth” in the original, it was pot-au-feu.

In French, pot-au-feu can serve as an analogue of the Russian expression “hodgepodge” - all together, all in one pile. Historically, pot-au-feu may be the nickname of the philistine ^[2] :

In general, all Russian dancers are distinguished by family inclinations, they love their art and their relatives very much, if they have such, and in general are real pot-au-feu.

- K.A. Skalkovsky . “In the theater world. Observations, Memories and Reasonings