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Consomme with Brussels Sprouts
Cook sufficient Brussels sprouts in salted water until tender, add them to 3 pints of consomme amber.
A garnish recipe rather than a soup recipe: everything depends on the clarity of the consommé and on not overcooking the sprouts. Assume the book's own amber consommé is already made and strained.
- Consomme amberAn amber consomme is a clarified stock, usually beef, tinted a deep gold; colour was commonly got from caramel colouring or from onion skins and a halved onion charred on the stove, though the book does not say which it intends here. It should be brilliant and fat-free; any cloudiness shows badly against the green sprouts.
- QuantityThree pints is six cups, enough for six first-course cups or four bowls. For that amount allow about 18 to 24 small sprouts, three or four per serving.
- Cook the sprouts separatelyThe point of boiling them in salted water on their own is that sprouts leach sulphurous flavour and colour into any liquid they cook in. Never boil them in the consomme itself.
- TimingSmall sprouts are tender in 5 to 7 minutes, halved ones in 3 to 4. Longer boiling, of the sort older books often directed, leaves them grey and strong-smelling; drain as soon as a knife slips in.
- Hold the colourRefresh the drained sprouts in cold water if you are not serving at once, then warm them through in a ladleful of the hot consomme just before dishing.
- Size and trimmingChoose sprouts of even, small size and trim the stem flush without cutting into the leaves, or the outer layer falls apart in the broth. Large sprouts are better halved through the root.
- ServingDivide the sprouts among heated cups, then pour the consomme over so the garnish sits neatly rather than being stirred to pieces. Salt the consomme after adding them, since the sprouts carry salt from their cooking water.
Classic French service names a consomme for whatever garnish floats in it, and the great hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth century kept dozens of such variations from a single pot of clarified stock, which is why entries like this one are so brief in books of the period. Brussels sprouts, a cabbage bred for the compact buds along its stalk, are generally traced to the region around Brussels in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and reached American markets in quantity only as commercial market gardening expanded. In a consomme they served the same purpose as a royale custard or a scattering of pearl tapioca: a small, deliberate note of colour and texture in a soup whose whole virtue was transparency.