Home › Soup Stock › Consomme with Mushrooms
Consomme with Mushrooms
Cut into small cubes enough mushrooms to make a pint. Saute them in butter, add to 3 pints of consomme, let them simmer fifteen minutes, add 1/2 glass of sherry and a little nutmeg. Let it heat up, and serve.
A garnish soup that depends entirely on the quality of the consommé beneath it. The only real technique is the sherry, which should meet heat briefly and never boil.
- Sherry last, and barely warmed"Let it heat up" means exactly that: bring it back to steaming and stop. Boiling after the wine goes in drives off the aromatics and can leave the soup tasting flat.
- How much is half a glassA wineglass in American cookbooks of this period is usually reckoned at 2 fluid ounces, which makes half a glass about 2 tablespoons for 6 cups of soup. Some writers meant a larger sherry glass, so the measure is genuinely loose; start at 2 tablespoons and add more to taste. Use a dry amontillado or fino, not a sweet cream sherry.
- A pint of mushroomsMeasured as cut cubes, that is roughly 6 to 8 ounces of whole mushrooms, or about 200 grams. Cremini give more colour and flavour than white buttons and hold their shape better through the simmer.
- Sauté properly firstCook the cubes in butter over fairly high heat until the water has driven off and they begin to brown. Mushrooms added raw or under-cooked release liquid into the soup and cloud a consommé that someone took trouble to clarify.
- Three pintsSix cups of consommé. Homemade clarified stock is the point of the dish; if using canned or boxed broth, taste before adding salt, since the reduction of the sauté and the sherry both concentrate what is there.
- The fifteen-minute simmerKeep it at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil. A hard boil will pull fat and fine particles back into suspension and undo the clarity.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little — a few strokes for the whole pot. Pre-ground nutmeg is dusty by comparison and easy to overdo in a clear soup where nothing hides.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, which serves six as a first course in shallow bowls or cups.
Consomme with a single named garnish was the standard structure of the first course in late nineteenth-century service: the stock was made once, clarified with egg white and lean beef, then sent out in a dozen guises depending on what went into the bowl - royale, julienne, vermicelli, mushrooms. Collections of this kind print the garnish variations as separate short entries because the labour all sat upstream in the stockpot. A fortified wine added at the last moment was an accepted way to give a clear soup depth without clouding or thickening it.