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Brunoise Soup
Take half an onion, two carrots, one turnip, and one leek. Peel the onion, pare and wash the carrots, turnip, and leek, and cut them into very small dice. Put them into a stewpan, add one ounce of butter, and season with a little salt, pepper, and sugar. Cover, and keep over the fire for a few minutes, shaking the pan well to prevent burning. Pour in two quarts of clear stock, and boil gently for about half an hour. Take off the fat, and serve with sippets of toast.
A clear vegetable soup that lives or dies on knife work; everything else is straightforward.
- The dice is the dishThe recipe asks only for "very small dice"; in modern practice brunoise is standardised at about 1/8 inch (3 mm). Cut evenly, the pieces cook at the same rate and stay suspended in the broth. Uneven dice gives you mush and raw carrot in the same spoonful.
- Quantities and yieldTwo quarts of stock with this amount of vegetable serves six to eight as a first course. The vegetables should read as a garnish in clear liquid, not as a chunky soup.
- StewpanA wide, heavy saucepan with a lid. The point of the wide base is contact with the heat so the dice sweat rather than steam.
- Sweating, not browning"Keep over the fire for a few minutes" means gentle heat with the lid on until the vegetables soften and give up moisture, five to eight minutes. Any colour on the onion will darken the finished soup.
- The pinch of sugarLikely a corrective for the turnip and leek rather than a sweetener; the recipe specifies only "a little", and a scant 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity is plenty.
- Clear stockA well-skimmed, unthickened stock; beef or veal suits it best, though the recipe does not say which. Modern boxed stock is usually salted, so hold back the salt until the end. Skim rather than stir, or the broth goes murky.
- TimingHalf an hour at a bare simmer is on the long side for 3 mm dice. Check at 15 minutes; the vegetables want to be tender but still holding their shape.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toasted or fried bread, served alongside or dropped in at the table. Added early they dissolve.
Brunoise is one of the standard cuts of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, and by the time Cassell's was compiled the word served as both a knife technique and the name of the clear soup that showed it off. The soup exists to demonstrate two lessons at once, the value of a uniform small dice and the discipline of keeping a consommé clear. English cookery absorbed a great deal of this French vocabulary through figures such as Francatelli and through the hotel trade, and household dictionaries like this one were one of the routes by which terms such as brunoise, julienne and printanier reached the domestic cook. The sippets of toast are the older English element in the bowl, a survival of the long-standing habit of serving broth over sops of bread.