Recipe no. 1 from Jean-Baptiste Reboul's La Cuisinière provençale (1909), page 9.
Reboul's text
Before entering into the matter, we believe it is strictly necessary to explain in a few lines, through a somewhat developed theory, this operation so simple that it is called pot au feu and which, in fact, is an entirely chemical process.
We shall therefore follow it through its whole course. All meat is composed mainly of fibres, fat, gelatine, osmazome and albumin.
The fibres are insoluble; they make up almost alone what remains of the meat once it has undergone long boiling.
Fat is soluble through boiling; but since it is enclosed in cells formed by a very fine membrane that does not dissolve, part of the fat always remains attached to the fibres; the other part floats on the broth, this being the part that escaped from the cells that were not whole or that were broken by the boiling.
Gelatine is soluble; it is what, when abundant, makes the broth set into a jelly.
Small Provençal glossary for this recipe
Reboul writes in French: no Provençal word appears in this recipe, apart from the dish's name itself. The table below gives the Provençal equivalents of the words used, in mistralian spelling, translated by Lingua Nostra. Each form is attested in our Provençal-English dictionary; click to open the entry.
| Provençal | English |
|---|---|
| viando | meat |
| fielandro | fibres |
| graisso | fat |
| jalarèio | gelatine |
| boui | boiling |
| bouioun | broth |
| gelado | jelly |
Source: Jean-Baptiste Reboul, La Cuisinière provençale, Marseille, 1909, recipe no. 1, page 9. Public domain. Transcription, formatting and Provençal glossary by Lingua Nostra.