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Consomme Printanier
Cut two carrots and one turnip into shapes with a vegetable scoop, simmer for twenty minutes in salted water, drain and throw into one quart of consomme, with two tablespoonfuls of cooked French beans, cut into small pieces. Add a handful of chiffonade, cook five minutes more and serve.
A garnish soup: the consommé is assumed to be already made and clear, and everything here is about the vegetables that go into it. The whole point is that the broth stays transparent, so cook the vegetables separately and only then combine.
- Vegetable scoopA small scoop of the parisienne (melon-baller) type, used to cut carrot and turnip into uniform small balls or similar shapes. Something around a 1/2-inch bowl works; failing that, cut small dice or bâtonnets of even size so they cook at the same rate.
- ChiffonadeIn classical soup usage this generally means sorrel and lettuce shredded into fine ribbons, often softened in a little butter first rather than added raw. "A handful" is left to the cook; take it as a modest quantity of leaves before shredding. If sorrel is unavailable, spinach with a squeeze of lemon stands in for the sharpness.
- French beansGreen beans, cooked separately in salted water until just tender, then cut into small pieces, say about 1/4 inch. They are added already cooked, so five minutes in the soup is all they should get.
- Twenty minutes is longCarrot and turnip balls that small are usually tender in 8 to 12 minutes of gentle simmering. Test one; overcooked they collapse into the consommé and cloud it, which defeats the dish.
- Keep the broth clearNever boil the assembled soup, and drain the vegetables well before they go in. Hard boiling breaks the vegetables up and carries starch into the broth, turning a clarified consommé hazy.
- ConsomméOne quart of good clear beef or chicken consommé, well seasoned before the garnish goes in, since the drained vegetables will dilute it slightly. Canned broth reduced a little and strained through a cloth is the practical substitute.
- YieldOne quart serves four as a first course, about a cup each. Ladle so each bowl gets an even share of carrot, turnip, beans and greens.
Printanier means "of springtime," and in classical French service the name signals a clear soup garnished with the first small vegetables of the year, cut to a uniform size and added at the last moment. The style belongs to the codified repertoire of garnished consommés that Escoffier and his contemporaries set out around the turn of the twentieth century — the Guide Culinaire appeared in 1903 — where dozens of soups differed from one another only in what was dropped into the same clarified broth. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, published a book that works in that idiom: the consommé itself is made elsewhere in quantity, and the recipe a cook needed at hand was simply the garnish. Shaping carrots and turnips into identical spheres with a vegetable scoop is patient, repetitive labor, whoever is doing it.