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Soups or Potages
Soups may be divided into two classes: 1st. Clear, transparent soups, or consommés, of meat, game, or poultry, varying according to the floating garnish added to them. 2ndly. Thick soups, including purées of game, vegetables, etc.
At a large dinner, when there are two soups, one is thick and the other clear.
Consommé à la Julienne has a floating garnish of vegetables cut in strips. à la Xavier has a garnish of threads of vegetables. à la Jardinière is garnished with vegetables cut in small fancy shapes. à la Brunoise has vegetables cut in small dice.
Four sentences of real instruction and then four consommés. The instruction is worth more than the list: soups divide into clear and thick, and a large dinner puts out one of each.
- Two soups meant a choiceBoth went on the table and each guest took one. That requires two tureens and somebody to serve from them, and it is the only thing on the page a modern kitchen cannot reproduce without help in the room.
- ConsomméA stock clarified until print can be read through it, usually by drawing egg white and minced lean meat up through it as a raft. It is a day’s work, and the entire reason for the work is that the garnish has to be visible, suspended in the clear liquid.
- Julienne, Jardinière, Brunoise, XavierThese are knife cuts, not recipes, and they are the whole difference between the four soups listed. Julienne is matchsticks, brunoise is fine dice, jardinière is small fancy shapes, and the page gives à la Xavier as threads finer again than julienne. Two of those words are still taught in every professional kitchen.
- The thick classThe page’s second category is purées of game or vegetables, thickened by their own substance. That is also the current preference, which is worth saying because the intervening century filled the gap with roux and cream and has only lately climbed back out.
- Garnish at the last momentEverything named here is cut small and dropped in at the end. Vegetables cooked in the consommé cloud it and undo the whole day’s clarifying, so blanch them separately and add them to the hot soup as it is plated.
Consommé is the most conspicuous thing a nineteenth-century kitchen could serve, and it is conspicuous precisely because nothing of it shows. Pounds of meat and a day of attention are reduced to a clear amber liquid with three threads of carrot floating in it; the labour is total and the evidence is invisible, which is the point. A guest who understood what had gone into the tureen was being told something about the house, and a guest who did not was at least being handed something unmistakably difficult. The convention this page records — one thick soup and one clear at any large dinner — put that display next to its opposite, a plain purée of game or vegetables, and let the table choose between them. The choice was itself part of the hospitality, and it needed a staffed dining room to be offered at all.