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Consommé with Vegetables
To six cups Consommé (for recipe see Page 149) add French string beans cut in diamonds, carrots cooked and cut in tiny fancy shapes (using French vegetable cutters), and French peas. Serve with toasted Cheese Crackers.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a full recipe: the work is in the consommé itself, and the garnish is cut to look deliberate. A few notes on the parts the original assumes you already know.
- Six cups serves sixSix cups probably serves about six -- the original names no yield. Clear soups were commonly served in small portions as a first course, and if you are following the book's Sunday dinner menus this would be the opening course.
- The garnish must not cloud the brothCook the beans, carrots and peas separately in salted water, then rinse and add them to the hot consommé at the last moment. Simmering vegetables in the consommé releases starch and dulls the clarity that the base recipe worked to achieve.
- "French string beans"Probably haricots verts, the slender kind, though in period American usage the phrase can also refer to beans cut French-style. Ordinary green beans work if you cut them on a sharp bias to make the diamond shapes the recipe wants.
- "French peas"Likely the small petits pois, often sold tinned as French peas; fresh young peas would suit equally. Frozen baby peas, cooked barely a minute, give a good result.
- French vegetable cuttersSmall tinned or aspic cutters, sold in sets for exactly this kind of decorative work. A mini cutter set, a melon baller for pearls, or simply carrots cut into fine batons and then short diamonds all serve.
- Quantity is left to youThe original names no amounts. Roughly a third of a cup of mixed vegetables per serving keeps it a garnished consommé rather than a vegetable soup.
- Cheese crackersPresumably crackers with grated hard cheese melted on top, served hot alongside; the book carries its own recipe. A few minutes under a hot broiler or in a hot oven is enough.
Consommé — clarified broth, from the French for "completed" or "consummated" — was the mark of a properly run kitchen in the early twentieth century, because it cannot be faked: the clarity depends on a patient raft of egg white and lean meat and a broth that is never allowed to boil. Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was built for the American middle-class household that wanted restaurant-style service without a French chef, and this menu shows the pattern clearly: one laborious base recipe from page 149, then a fresh seasonal garnish cut into shapes with a set of tinned cutters. The diamonds and fancy rounds are not decoration for its own sake. In a soup you can see through, the garnish is the entire visual interest, and cutting vegetables to a uniform small size gave the dish the look of professional service.