No. 232

Consomme a la Florentine

Make a garnishing of small stars cut from carrots each one an inch and a quarter in diameter by one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness; blanch them in boiling, salted water, then finish to cook in consomme; have also inch diameter rings made of chicken forcemeat (No. 62), colored with spinach green laid through a pocket on buttered tins, then poached in boiling, salted water; some rounds cut from turnips three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness by three-quarters of an inch in diameter, blanched, cooked in consomme and reduced to a glaze; when the liquid has all evaporated the turnips should be done. Serve these garnishings with a little consomme and at the same time a soup tureen of hot consomme.

← No. 231 Consomme a l'Imperatrice Soups & Broths No. 233 Consomme a la Franklyn →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a garnish recipe rather than a soup recipe: Ranhofer assumes you already have a gallon of clarified consommé at hand and are only dressing it. Everything hinges on the vegetables being cut to identical thickness, since a star a sixteenth of an inch thick is essentially a chip and a moment's inattention turns it to mush.

What you actually need firstA clear, well-seasoned consommé, clarified with egg white and lean beef in the classic manner. Ranhofer cross-references it constantly and never repeats it; without a genuinely limpid broth the whole point of the dish, which is visual, is lost.
The measurements are real, not approximateAn inch and a quarter across by one-sixteenth thick for the carrot stars, three-quarters by three-sixteenths for the turnip rounds. Use a small aspic or truffle cutter and a mandoline; hand-slicing to a sixteenth of an inch consistently is not realistic.
Chicken forcemeat (No. 62)Ranhofer's quenelle-type chicken forcemeat, pounded raw and lightened; the exact composition is given under No. 62, not here. A food processor does in two minutes what the original expected of a mortar; keep everything cold and pass it through a drum sieve or fine strainer afterward for the smooth texture that makes the rings hold their shape.
Spinach greenNineteenth-century kitchens made this by pressing raw spinach juice, heating it gently until the green solids coagulated, then straining them off as a paste. A tablespoon or two of very concentrated blanched-spinach purée, squeezed bone dry, gives the same colour without thinning the forcemeat.
"Laid through a pocket"A pastry bag with a plain small tip. Pipe the rings directly onto buttered tins or a buttered sheet of parchment, then slide them into water held just below a boil rather than at a rolling one — the original says boiling, but forcemeat piped that thin will blow apart. Poach only until the rings are firm and set through.
Glazing the turnipsThis is the one step to watch. The turnips finish cooking exactly as the consommé reduces away to a syrup that coats them; pull them a moment early and they are raw in the middle, a moment late and the glaze scorches. Use a wide shallow pan so the liquid reduces evenly.
Cook the carrots separatelyBlanch, then finish in a little consommé of their own. Cooking the garnish in the tureen would cloud the broth, which is the failing the entire clarification process exists to prevent.
Service and yieldService -- The garnishes go out with a little consomme, and the tureen of hot broth follows and is poured at the table. Ranhofer gives no quantities here, so the number of stars, rings and rounds per plate is left to the cook.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows what that kitchen thought a consommé was for. The broth itself is standardised and referenced by number; the recipe is the decoration. Nineteenth-century French service ran dozens of named consommés that differed only in garnish — Florentine, Impératrice, Franklyn, one after another in this very section — and the name attached to a garnish rather than a flavour. À la florentine conventionally signals spinach, which here appears not as a vegetable but purely as a dye for the forcemeat rings, a use of spinach green that goes back at least to Carême and was standard in professional French kitchens for tinting quenelles and butters. The fussiness may well be the point: it is tempting to read the cutting of carrots into stars a sixteenth of an inch thick as a demonstration of brigade labour, a suggestion that a house kept enough hands in the larder to spend an afternoon on something that dissolved on contact with a spoon.