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Consommé Princesse
Standard consommé served with shreds or small dice of cooked chicken and green peas.
This is a garnish formula rather than a full recipe: the work is in the consommé, and the entry assumes you have the book's standard version to hand. A few notes on making it behave.
- The hinge is clarityA consommé is judged on transparency, so nothing cloudy should touch it. Clarify the stock with an egg-white raft, strain through a cloth-lined sieve, and never let it boil once clarified — a rolling boil breaks the raft's work back into suspension.
- Garnish separatelyCook the peas and the chicken apart from the broth and warm them in a little of the strained consommé before plating. Simmering them in the finished soup can release starch and fat and cloud it.
- PeasFresh shelled peas want two to three minutes in salted water, then an ice bath to hold the colour. Frozen peas are entirely acceptable here and need only to be thawed and heated through.
- ChickenPoached breast, or the meat lifted from the bird used to make the stock, cut in fine julienne or 5 mm dice. Roast chicken works but its browned edges shed colour into the broth.
- Quantity of garnishAbout a tablespoon of chicken and a tablespoon of peas per serving is a reasonable proportion; the broth, not the garnish, is the dish.
- Seasoning at the endConsommé is served very hot and reads flat if under-salted. Taste after reheating, not before, since any reduction concentrates the salt already there.
- YieldReckon 150–200 ml (about ¾ cup) per person as a first course, in a shallow soup plate or a two-handled consommé cup.
French classical kitchens catalogued consommés by their garnish, and a printed list of them functioned as a shorthand a trained cook could read: the name told you what went into the cup. "Princesse" is generally associated with chicken and green peas, sometimes with asparagus tips as well, and sits among the named-garnish consommés — Royale, Célestine, Colbert — that appear on late nineteenth-century menus. Butterick, a pattern and magazine publisher writing for American households rather than professional brigades, included such entries at a time when formal dinner service was something a middle-class hostess might be expected to imitate; the terse phrasing suggests the reader was assumed to want the vocabulary as much as the method.