No. 223

Consomme Celestine

Consomme a la Copestone

A garnishing of thin pancakes without sugar; spread over each pancake a layer of chicken forcemeat and fine herbs; set on top and press down another pancake, add another layer of forcemeat and one more pancake, and press the whole lightly, then with a column tube cut out round pieces one and three-quarters inches in diameter; lay these on a buttered baking tin, one beside the other, and leave them in a slack oven for about ten minutes, just allowing them time enough to poach. Place the garnishing in a tureen with some lettuce cut in very fine thread-like fillets, blanched and cooked in consomme and a pluche of parsley (a few leaves of young, blanched parsley); serve at the same time a soup tureen of consomme.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a garnish recipe rather than a soup: the consommé itself is made elsewhere in the book, and what follows is the ornament that goes into the tureen. Note also that the page heading and the recipe line disagree — Ranhofer numbered this one Consommé à la Copestone, while Célestine is the more familiar name for the crêpe garnish family.

Slack ovenA slack oven is 250-300F. The point is to set the forcemeat without browning or puffing the pancakes; ten minutes at 300F on a buttered tray, covered loosely with foil, is the modern equivalent.
Cook the forcemeat through"Just allowing them time enough to poach" assumes very thin layers of farce. Chicken forcemeat should reach 165F at the centre; with a thicker spread, ten minutes will not get there. Check one round with an instant-read probe before assembling the tureen.
Pancakes without sugarThese are plain unsweetened crêpes, made thin — flour, egg, milk, salt, a little melted butter. Anything thick or spongy will swell in the consommé and cloud it.
Chicken forcemeatA classic farce: raw breast meat pounded or processed with egg white, seasoned, then let down with cream over ice. It must be spreadable but stiff enough to hold between layers. "Fine herbs" here means finely chopped parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon.
Column tubeA column tube is a plain round cutter or the wide end of a pastry tube. Any 1¾-inch plain cutter does the job; cut the rounds after the layers are pressed, not before.
Pluche of parsleyThe recipe defines it in passing: whole small parsley leaves, stems removed, blanched a few seconds in boiling salted water and refreshed. They go in raw-green, not cooked into the soup.
The lettuceCut in a fine chiffonade, blanched, then finished in a little of the consommé so it carries the same flavour. Drain it well — waterlogged lettuce dulls a clear soup.
ServingGarnish and consomme travel separately and meet at the table; the rounds are ladled over so they float rather than sit in hot liquid for long. The recipe gives no quantities, so the number of rounds and the volume of consomme per person are left to the cook.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York at its height, and its consommé chapter runs to a great many numbered variations distinguished almost entirely by garnish — the clear broth is a constant, the trimming is the name. Consommé Célestine, the title under which this page appears, is the standard French designation for a garnish of thin unsweetened pancakes, usually cut in ribbons or, as here, layered with forcemeat and stamped into rounds; the name is generally traced to the practice of naming garnishes after women, real or notional, rather than to any documented Célestine. The technique itself belongs to the mid-nineteenth-century grande cuisine that Ranhofer trained in, where a great deal of skilled labour went into small floating objects: royales, quenelles, printanier vegetables cut into identical shapes. That such work was expected of an à la carte restaurant kitchen, not just a private house with a large staff, says most of what needs saying about Delmonico's.