No. 225

Consomme Colbert, with Poached Eggs

Consomme Colbert, aux oeufs poches

A garnishing of carrots and turnips cut into quarter of an inch balls, then blanched and cooked separately in white consomme. Green peas, lozenge-shaped string beans, and small sprigs of cauliflower, and some very small eggs poached in water, salted and acidulated with vinegar, crusts of bread-crumbs, six-eighths of an inch in diameter by one-eighth in thickness, masked with butter and browned in the oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a garnish formula rather than a full recipe: Ranhofer assumes you already have a clear consommé from earlier in the chapter and tells you only what goes into the bowl. Everything here is cooked apart from the soup and set in at the last moment so the broth stays crystal clear.

The hinge: nothing cooks in the finished soupEach vegetable is blanched and simmered separately, then drained, so no starch or scum clouds the consommé. Warm the garnish in a little broth, arrange it in heated plates, and pour the boiling consommé over at the table.
"White consommé"A pale, unbrowned clear stock — poultry and veal, no roasted bones or caramel colouring. It is used here as the cooking liquid for the carrots and turnips so they take on flavour without staining or dulling the finished soup.
Quarter-inch ballsQuarter-inch balls — A 6 mm ball cutter, one of the smaller Parisienne scoops, gives about the size Ranhofer wants (a quarter inch is 6.4 mm). If you have no cutter, dice to a scant 6 mm; the shape is decorative but the uniform size is what makes the pieces cook evenly.
Lozenge-shaped string beansBeans cut on a long diagonal into diamonds, roughly the length of the vegetable balls. The whole garnish is meant to read as one scale of small, tidy shapes.
Poaching the eggsPoaching the eggs — Salted water with a splash of vinegar sets the white quickly. Use the freshest eggs you can, poach about three minutes at a bare shiver so the yolk stays soft, and slip them into cold water; reheat briefly in hot broth before serving. Ranhofer says only 'very small eggs' and does not specify what kind; pullet eggs are the likely reading, and one small hen's egg per plate is a workable modern equivalent.
The bread crustsThe bread crusts — Rounds of crumb six-eighths of an inch across (about 19 mm) and one-eighth thick (about 3 mm), masked with butter and browned in the oven. Ranhofer gives no temperature; a moderate oven until pale gold will do.
QuantityQuantity — No amounts are given here, as is often the case with Ranhofer's garnish formulas. As a working ratio, allow about two tablespoons of mixed garnish and one poached egg to each 250 ml cup of consomme; the soup should look clear with vegetables in it, not like a vegetable soup.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house repertoire written down — consommés distinguished from one another only by what is dropped into the bowl. Consommé Colbert is one of the standard garnishes of French classical cookery, a mixed printanière of small-cut spring vegetables with a poached egg, and it is generally traced to the naming habit of nineteenth-century chefs who attached the names of ministers and statesmen — here Louis XIV's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert — to preparations that had nothing to do with them. The egg is the signature: broken with the spoon, the yolk enriches the clear broth as it is eaten, which is a small piece of theatre that only works if the consommé underneath has been clarified properly.