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Vegetable Consomme, Made with Dried Vegetables
Put a pint of white haricot beans and a pint of lentils, previously soaked in water overnight, into a stewpan with an onion, a pinch of salt, a bunch of parsley, and a small sprig of thyme. Pour over these ingredients three quarts of water, then boil and simmer them gently for three hours. Strain the liquor. Fry the vegetables, and proceed as for VEGETABLE CONSOMME, MADE WITH FRESH
A dry-store stock for winter, when the fresh vegetables of the companion recipe were unavailable. The instructions are terse because the book expects you to have read the fresh-vegetable version first.
- A pint of beansThe book measures these dry goods by volume. An imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so roughly 2½ US cups, in the region of a pound of dried haricots; the same again in lentils. Together they will swell considerably once soaked.
- Three quarts of waterAbout 3.4 litres in imperial measure (2.8 if you read the quarts as US). Three hours of gentle simmering will cost you an appreciable amount to evaporation, so use a roomy pan and top up if the beans threaten to break the surface.
- Lentils need no overnight soakBrown or green lentils hydrate in under an hour and will simply go to mush alongside beans given the full night. Soak the haricots overnight and add the lentils to the pan dry, at the start of the simmer.
- Keep it at a bare trembleThis is the hinge. A rolling boil drives starch and broken bean skins into the liquor and you get a cloudy, gluey broth that no straining will rescue. Bring to the boil once, skim the grey scum, then hold it just below a simmer for the full three hours.
- Strain twiceA colander catches the solids; a second pass through a sieve lined with damp muslin or a coffee filter is what gives a consommé its clarity. Do not press the solids through, and let the strained liquor settle so you can pour it off the sediment.
- "Fry the vegetables"The instruction points you at the fresh-vegetable version and expects you to follow its method from that point, frying the vegetables and simmering them in this strained bean liquor before straining again. The browning is where the broth gets its colour and sweetness; the beans supply body and background savour. Which aromatics the companion recipe specifies cannot be stated from this page alone.
- Salt at the endA pinch at the start is all the recipe gives. Early salting was traditionally held to slow bean softening, though that is disputed; in any case the liquor concentrates, so season the finished consommé rather than the pot.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of strained broth, less again after the second simmer; on the order of eight servings as a clear soup course. It freezes well; the strained bean solids can be turned into a purée rather than discarded.
The pairing of a fresh and a dried version says something about a late-Victorian larder: haricots and lentils sat in the dry store all year, whatever the season brought. Calling the result a consommé is a deliberate claim -- in classical French practice a true consommé is a broth cooked down and clarified with egg white and lean meat. What the book offers instead is clarity achieved by patience: long, slow, unagitated simmering and careful straining. Meatless stocks of this kind had obvious uses for Lent and Friday abstinence, and for the vegetarian societies then gaining ground in Britain, though Cassell's makes no argument about any of that and simply lists the thing as a useful base.