One Pot Two Dishes - One Flame Rides Again

My son, aka Sternest Critic, has some quirky dislikes. One is that he likes meat that is stewed (let's face it he likes meat), but hates it to come with the liquid in which it cooked. A neat solution to this enjoyed last week was a version of the French Pot au Feu, where the liquid is served as a soup before the rest makes it to table as a main course. Two courses, one pot.

It helped the soup part that the dish was made with stock prepared previously using free bones from the butcher (I've taken to doing this when buying a load of meat, and never get any hassle) and another from the freezer, the penultimate bit of our Serrano ham bone. Those had cooked with some veg and other flavour enhancers, so the stock itself would have done as a soup (some more in fact did at the weekend, with mushrooms, noodles and star anise). But after it had in addition been the cooking medium for chuck steak and shin, with more veg, it was excellent - served without any thickening, likewise sans meat and veg, it was a really really good beef consome.

The original stock benefited btw from a beetroot being one of the vegetables, giving an earthy depth, but more importantly a fine colour.

The solid components were tasty enough, the beef not needing a knife to cut it, but not in the same league as the soup.

I've been trying to think of similar two-dishes-one-pot stuff, with little success. The only one that sprang to mind could in fact be a threefor, doing a similar stew for the soup and solids, but cooking a sweet dumpling or several in with the savoury bits. To modern eyes that may seem odd, but to cooks of centuries past (including the last one) with limited cooking equipment it made sense, and our contemporary separation of sweet and savoury would seem weird to medieval cooks in particular, but even our grandmothers (for those of us in the third decade of our thirties) were not averse to such things.

I have made apple dumplings in this way to eat as pudding, the edge with its meaty tang not putting anyone off devouring them.