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Colbert Soup
Cut the hearts from four or five heads of celery, blanch them well, put them in a saucepan with a lump of butter, and fry; then pour in some clear soup and boil it. Beat the yolks of three eggs with one teacupful of cream, move the saucepan to the side of the fire, and stir in the eggs and the cream quickly. Poach some eggs, put them into a soup tureen, pour the sauce over them, and serve.
A consommé finished with an egg-and-cream liaison and garnished with poached eggs. Everything here is straightforward except the liaison, which decides whether the soup is silky or curdled.
- The hinge: never let the liaison boilOnce the beaten yolks and cream go in, the soup must not exceed about 180F. "Move the saucepan to the side of the fire" meant shifting the pan to a cooler part of the range, away from the fiercest heat; in a modern kitchen, temper a ladle of hot soup into the yolks first, then return the mixture, stirring, over the lowest heat until it coats a spoon.
- Celery heartsFour or five heads gives the pale inner ribs from something in the region of 4 to 6 lb of celery, depending on the size of the heads. Trim to the tender heart, cut into short lengths, and blanch briefly in salted water to take off the raw bitterness before they meet the butter.
- "A lump of butter"Read this as 2 tablespoons. The celery should sweat and gloss rather than colour; browning it works against the pale finish the soup wants.
- "Clear soup"A clarified beef or chicken consommé, about 2 quarts for this quantity. A good unsalted stock, well skimmed, will do, though it will not have the clarity the name implies.
- TeacupfulPeriod equivalences vary; a teacupful is usually reckoned somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, and the original is genuinely imprecise here. Heavy cream holds the emulsion better than light.
- Poached eggs and yieldOne egg per serving, poached soft so the yolk runs into the soup. The recipe gives no number; the quantities suggest perhaps six servings. Poach the eggs last, and if serving over any length of time consider warmed bowls rather than the single tureen the original calls for.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified; a well-seasoned clear soup would have carried it. Taste and correct after the liaison goes in, and add nothing that requires further boiling.
Dishes styled à la Colbert in French cookery are generally traced to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though the connection is honorific rather than documented — nineteenth-century chefs attached statesmen's names to garnishes freely. In the classical repertoire consommé Colbert is a clear soup garnished with small cut vegetables and a poached egg.