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SANTE, POTAGE DE (Careme's recipe)
Put into a stock-pot two roast fowls (to colour the soup slightly), a knuckle of veal (removing the bony end), and some bones of roast beef, if you have any; add the necessary beef stock (twenty ladlefuls), so that the consomme when reduced may contain about fifteen ladlefuls; remove the scum, after which add salt and pepper to taste; boil it slowly for five hours, skim off the fat, and take up the meats; then mix in the consomme the white of an egg beaten up with a little cold beef stock to clarify it; after twenty minutes' boiling, strain it through a napkin, and again set it to boil, mixing with it the following roots and vegetables: the red part of a large carrot, cut, with a root-cutter, in columns three-quarters of an inch wide, and each column being divided into slices one-eighth of an inch in thickness; a large turnip prepared in the same manner; as also two heads of celery and two leeks sliced--these roots should be blanched; add two small lettuces, a little sorrel and chervil. After an hour's boiling throw in a little sugar and three table-spoonfuls of asparagus points of a fine green, and throw the soup into a tureen containing small crusts of a French roll rasped, cut round three-quarters of an inch wide, without the least appearance of crumb, and dried in a hot closet.
A grand-service clear soup: beef consommé fortified with roast poultry and veal, clarified, then finished with neatly cut vegetables and dried bread crusts. Nothing here is difficult, but the whole point is clarity, so the order of operations matters more than the ingredient list.
- The hinge: never boil the clarificationOnce the beaten egg white goes in, the liquid must be brought up slowly and held at the barest tremble. A rolling boil shatters the coagulated raft and drives the cloud back into the soup, and no amount of straining afterwards will recover it.
- LadlefulsLadle sizes were not standardised; if the kitchen ladle held roughly a pint, twenty ladlefuls would be on the order of 10 quarts reducing to about 7 or 8. The measure is genuinely imprecise; work from the ratio rather than the number, reducing by about a quarter.
- Two roast fowlsThese are there for colour and depth, not for eating. Two roasted chicken carcasses with some meat left on, or the frames from a couple of birds already served, do the same work. Scale the whole recipe down by three-quarters for a domestic pot.
- Knuckle of vealAsk for veal shank cut across, or substitute beef shin with its marrow bone. This is the gelatine source that gives the finished consommé its body and the faint stickiness on the lips that marks a good one.
- Five hours, then stopA long slow extraction is correct, but keep it below a simmer throughout and skim often. Hard boiling emulsifies fat into the stock and no clarification will fix that either. Chill the strained stock and lift the fat as a cake if time allows.
- Cutting the rootsA root-cutter is a column cutter; a plain round pastry cutter or an apple corer gives the same three-quarter-inch cylinder, sliced an eighth of an inch thick. Blanching them separately in salted water keeps the starch and any bitterness out of the clear soup.
- Sorrel, chervil, lettuceSorrel is the signature of a potage santé and the acid it brings is not optional; spinach is not a substitute. Add the leaves late, as an hour of boiling will turn them olive-drab. Chervil should go in almost at the tureen.
- Asparagus pointsThree tablespoonfuls of tips, blanched separately until just tender and refreshed in cold water, then dropped in at the end, as the recipe directs, so as to keep the 'fine green' it asks for.
- The croûtesThe croûtes -- Rasped means the browned outside grated off a stale French roll, leaving rounds of crust with no crumb. The 'hot closet' was a warming cupboard of unspecified heat; a very low oven will dry them crisp. They go into the tureen dry and the soup is poured over them.
- YieldAs written this is banquet quantity: fifteen ladlefuls of finished soup, served at about 6 fl oz a head as a first course, would go round a great many more than fifteen people.
Antonin Carême (1784-1833) codified French clear soups for the great houses he cooked in, and this is presented as one of his recipes, reaching Cassell's through the nineteenth-century English kitchen literature it drew on. Potage de santé — "health soup" — is an older French name than Carême himself: it belonged to the family of light herb-and-root broths thought restorative, and the sorrel, chervil and lettuce are its inherited markers rather than decoration. In this version it is a full consommé, with roast poultry for colour, veal knuckle for body, and vegetables cut to uniform columns with a purpose-made tool. Its presence in a domestic dictionary of cookery is characteristic of the later nineteenth century, when publishers offered middle-class households the professional French repertoire more or less intact, ladlefuls and hot closets and all, on the assumption that a cook with a coal range and time could follow it.