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Brunoise Soup
Put into a saucepan an equal quantity of sliced carrots, onions, leeks, turnips and celery, with a good sized lump of butter, and fry the vegetables until brown; then pour in a small quantity of stock and boil it quickly until reduced to a glaze. Pour in the desired quantity of clear soup and boil. Prepare some Italian paste, boil it separately, then mix it with the soup. Turn the soup into a tureen and serve it with croutons of fried bread or toast. If desired, boiled rice can be substituted for the Italian paste, and rings of turnips fried in butter.
A consommé garnish soup that assumes you already have good clear stock on hand; the recipe is really a method for building flavour on top of it. Almost all the quantities are left to the cook.
- Cut to the nameBrunoise is a knife cut, not a soup: vegetables in even dice of about 1/8 inch. Oscar writes "sliced," but the dish is named for the dice, and uniform small cubes cook at the same rate and sit properly in a clear broth. Figure roughly 1/4 cup each of carrot, onion, leek, turnip and celery for six servings.
- Reducing to a glazeAfter browning the vegetables, add the small quantity of stock the recipe calls for and boil hard until it is a syrupy film clinging to the pan. This is the flavour hinge of the recipe; stop while it is still glossy and brown, since a glaze that catches and blackens will make the whole soup bitter.
- "Clear soup"This means consommé or a well-clarified stock, not the cloudy household stockpot. Around 6 cups for the vegetable quantity above. Simmer, do not boil hard, once it is in the pan, or the clarity you paid for is lost.
- Italian pastePeriod shorthand for small dried pasta shapes, the sort now sold as pastina, ditalini or stelline. The recipe has you boil it separately rather than in the soup; rinsing it as well will keep released starch from clouding a consommé.
- Butter"A good sized lump" is about 2 tablespoons. Enough to coat and brown the dice without the vegetables stewing in fat.
- Turnip ringsThe alternative garnish is turnip sliced into thin rounds and fried in butter until golden. It is decoration rather than substance.
- YieldThe recipe fixes no quantities; on the amounts suggested above it would give six to eight cups, serving six as a first course. The croutons are fried in butter or oil and served with the soup.
Brunoise takes its name from the French culinary vocabulary of the nineteenth century, where the word designates the fine dice itself; a potage brunoise is simply consommé garnished with those vegetables sweated or browned in butter. It belongs to the enormous family of clear soups that classical service treated as a kind of catalogue, each distinguished only by its garnish, and a hotel kitchen of Oscar Tschirky's era may well have kept one great pot of consommé running and dispatched a dozen differently named soups from it in the course of an evening, though this is a plausible generalisation about the practice rather than a documented one. The addition of "Italian paste" reflects the widespread American and English use of small imported dried pasta as a soup garnish well before pasta became a dish in its own right on this side of the Atlantic.