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Consommé Printaniere
To one quart of Chicken Consommé add one tablespoon each of cooked carrot and turnip, cut in small fancy shapes (using French vegetable cutter for this purpose), small peas, French beans and asparagus tips. Heat these vegetables in a small quantity of hot consommé; drain, place them in hot soup tureen and pour over boiling consommé.
A clear garnished broth that lives or dies on the clarity of the consommé and the separate cooking of the vegetables. Nothing here is difficult; the discipline is in keeping the liquid transparent.
- The hinge: never cook the vegetables in the serving brothStarch and vegetable debris cloud a consomme. Cook each vegetable separately until just tender, then warm it in a small quantity of consomme and drain it, as the original instructs; the warming liquid does not go into the tureen.
- Quantities and yieldOne quart of consomme with roughly five tablespoons of garnish; the recipe gives no yield, but a quart would stretch to about four first-course servings. A tablespoon per vegetable is a garnish, not a soup — resist adding more or you have a vegetable soup.
- French vegetable cutterA small hand tool of the period for cutting vegetables into decorative shapes. A small melon baller, a small aspic cutter, or simply carrot and turnip cut into neat 1/4-inch dice gives the same effect.
- French beansGreen beans, cut on the diagonal into short lengths or into fine julienne. Blanch two to three minutes so they stay bright.
- Asparagus tipsUse the top inch and a half only, blanched about ninety seconds. Add them last of all, since they break up and shed fibres into the broth if handled hot for long.
- Chicken consomméChicken consomme -- The capitalised name implies a clarified stock made to a recipe given elsewhere in the book. If you are starting from a good unclarified chicken stock, raft it with egg white and lean minced chicken, then strain through a cloth — a cloudy base defeats the whole dish.
- Serving temperatureWarm the tureen and bowls. A quart of clear broth cools very fast once it meets cold porcelain and a spoonful of chilled vegetables.
Printanière means simply "spring-like," and in classical French kitchen usage it signals a garnish of small young vegetables cut to uniform shapes — the same logic that gives us consommé julienne or brunoise, where the name describes the knife work rather than the flavouring. Its appearance in an American Sunday-dinner book is a reminder that these garnish names were codified vocabulary, borrowed wholesale from French practice, rather than seasonal instructions. The insistence on a special French vegetable cutter is characteristic of the period's ambition, when middle-class American households were being taught that a properly served dinner meant courses in the French manner, clear soup first, and visible evidence of skill in something as small as a turnip crescent.