Hunter’s Broth from Breakfast at Covertside
Those new to witnessing the grandeur and pageantry of a foxhunt are often transported back a century or more to a long lost time. This is no more so than in France, where mounted followers still pursue stag, roebuck, wild boar, hare and rabbit with different packs of hounds. Even the French hounds look a bit from a bygone era, as they still have a sliver of wolf-blood breed into many of the French breeds. But the riders are in their full glory with sabers and French hunting horns, accompanying their long frock coats and boots turned up to protect the knee. Sometimes cooking also takes you back to a bygone era, an era when things were made simply and at home, before commercialization took over everything including much of our cooking. This recipe takes us back not only to the era when soups didn’t come from a can or box, but for us, it also takes us back to Le Château de Champchevrier in the Loire valley where the Bizard family, who has lived in this grand palace in the forest, has been hunting stag there since 1728. They serve a version of this hunter’s broth in a gathering room next to the stables after hunts where it can often be cold and damp, as a way of refreshing and warming the hunters who stand by the fire where it is kept warm in a hanging caldron. In French cooking, a consommé is a type of clear soup made from richly flavored stock that has been clarified, a process which uses egg whites to remove fat and sediment. A broth is a liquid in which meat, fish or vegetables have cooked when the goal is also
