Brunoise
CHIFFONNADE, CROÛTE AU POT, JARDINIÈRE, JULIENNE, PAYSANNE, SPRING SOUP.— The basis of all these soups is a brown clear broth or double broth. Vegetables are added according to the season, and they are usually cut into small fancy shapes. They may be carrots, turnips, leeks, onions, celery, peas, kidney beans, lettuce, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers, asparagus, tarragon, chervil, parsley, sorrel, and woodsorrel. Do not overload the soup, but make a good selection; and when carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, or onions are used, prepare them first by frying them in a stewpan with two ounces of butter, a sprinkling of salt, and a teaspoonful of pounded sugar. The other vegetables may be simply blanched. Crusts of Bumper bread may be added, large or small, according to taste. When this soup has an abundance of vegetables and crusts in it-thus becoming almost a garbure-it is sometimes convenient to serve it in two separate tureens, one containing nothing but the clear broth, the other the vegetables and crusts, with just enough broth to float them. It is easier in this way to apportion the soup and the vegetables on each successive soup-plate.
For more about this soup and its varieties, the reader may turn to the Introductory Chapter and to the article on Julienne. As for the name Brunoise, although extremely common, it has not been adopted by any of the classical French dictionaries. Some of the cookery books call the soup Potage à la Brunoy.
A method rather than a fixed formula: a clear brown broth, a considered handful of vegetables cut small, and a decision about how to serve it. The points below cover the parts that assume a Victorian kitchen.
- The broth is the dish"Brown clear broth or double broth" means a clarified brown consommé, the double being a stock re-enriched by simmering fresh meat and bones in an already made one; Kettner does not say which meat. A commercial carton will not hold up here, since there is nothing else to hide behind; make or buy a properly clarified stock.
- Brunoise means the cutIn modern kitchens brunoise is a dice of about 1/8 inch (3 mm), cut from vegetables first squared into batons. Kettner's "small fancy shapes" is looser, but uniform size matters more than shape, since everything must finish cooking at the same moment.
- Sweating, not fryingButter, salt and sugar -- The two ounces of butter (about 55 g) with salt and a teaspoon of pounded sugar starts the roots off before the broth: they should soften and gloss. Kettner's word is "frying" rather than sweating, so a little colour is in keeping with a brown soup. The sugar is not there to make the soup sweet.
- Blanch the rest separatelyPeas, beans, asparagus tips, sprouts and the leaf herbs go into salted boiling water briefly and then into cold water. Added raw to the finished broth they cloud it; cooked in it from the start they turn drab.
- The delicate leaves go in lastTarragon, chervil, parsley, sorrel and wood sorrel should meet the hot broth at the very end, off the heat. Sorrel in particular collapses to a khaki puree within a minute or two of boiling.
- Bumper breadThe term is obscure and not securely documented; any firm, close-crumbed white bread will serve for the crusts.
- Garbure, and the two tureensGarbure is the thick vegetable-and-bread soup of southwest France, and Kettner's point is that once the solids outweigh the liquid you can no longer ladle evenly. Serving broth and garnish apart is still the sensible solution for a crowd.
- Yield and proportionKettner gives no quantities beyond the two ounces of butter; as a modern starting point, for six you might reckon on about 2 litres of consommé and 300-400 g of prepared vegetables in total. "Do not overload" is the operative instruction: four or five vegetables chosen for contrast beat ten thrown in together.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for August Kettner's Soho restaurant, is arranged as a dictionary, which is why an entry on Brunoise doubles as a note on half a dozen related clear soups. The name is usually traced to the town of Brunoy, southeast of Paris, though that connection is traditional rather than documented, and Dallas's complaint that the classical French dictionaries had not adopted the word sits with the older books' preference for potage à la Brunoy. What has changed since is the word's meaning: for Dallas it named a soup, whereas for a modern cook brunoise names only the small dice, one of the knife cuts that later professional kitchens fixed into a standard vocabulary. The list of vegetables here, running from carrots and turnips through to wood sorrel, is a reminder that these clear soups were seasonal by necessity, the garnish changing with what the kitchen garden had that week.