Home › The World's Kitchen › Consomme, Africaine
Consomme, Africaine
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan, adding two ounces well-washed rice, and boil for thirty-five minutes. Cut out from a small eggplant three slices a quarter of an inch thick, then cut them into quarter-inch squares, cut also into same shape three sweet red peppers. Place the two articles in a frying pan with teaspoon melted butter and gently cook for eight minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile, drain them on a cloth, then add the consomme. Dilute a half teaspoon curry powder in a tablespoon of consomme and add to the pan, boil for two minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup from the era when consommé was a blank canvas and the garnish supplied the name. The instructions assume you already have a finished consommé on hand and are vague about quantity; work from roughly 2 quarts.
- How much consomméNo volume is given. Two ounces of rice and three slices of eggplant suit about 2 quarts, which serves six to eight as a first course.
- Two ounces of riceThat is a weight, not a volume: about 1/3 cup of long-grain raw rice. Doubling it will turn a clear soup into a thick one.
- Thirty-five minutes is too longLong-grain rice cooked directly in broth is done in 15 to 18 minutes and will blow out and cloud the consommé past that. If you want the soup to stay clear, cook the rice separately in salted water and add it at the end.
- The garnish stays crispThe garnish -- Eggplant and pepper are cut to a quarter-inch dice and sweated in butter only to soften, then drained on a cloth so no fat reaches the surface of the soup. A film of butter on a clear consomme is a conspicuous fault.
- Sweet red peppersRipe red bell peppers. The book means sweet, not hot; nothing in this soup is meant to bite.
- The muddled line"then add the consomme" means the rice and broth go into the pan with the drained vegetables; the later "add to the pan" confirms the pan holds everything.
- Blooming the currySlaking half a teaspoon of curry powder in a spoonful of hot broth before it goes in prevents raw powdery clumps. Two minutes at a bare simmer is enough; a hard boil will dull the aromatics and cloud the soup.
- SeasoningConsomme is usually seasoned already, but taste after the curry goes in; the soup often needs a small correction.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchens ran on a single well-clarified beef or chicken consommé that was then given a different name for every garnish: à la royale for custard dice, brunoise for cut vegetables, and so on down a long list. Names attached to places were shorthand for the flavour signature a chef associated with them, and "africaine" in the French repertoire was applied to a range of garnishes, variously involving eggplant, tomato, cucumber or ceps, the produce and spice trade of the French and British colonial ports collapsed into a garnish. Where curry powder appeared, it may well have been a ready-mixed commercial blend, used in continental kitchens as a single seasoning rather than a set of spices. Such an entry in an international collection tells you less about African cooking than about how Escoffier-era classification worked: one mother soup, a fixed cut of garnish, and a label.