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Consomme, Andalouse
Prepare a consomme and keep simmering. Place two gills of tomato sauce in a small frying pan and let reduce on the range to a third the quantity, then place in a bowl, adding one gill cream, half a gill milk and three egg yolks. Season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper, mix well with a whisk, then strain it through a cheesecloth into three small lightly buttered pudding moulds, place in a tin, pour boiling water into the tin up to half their height and set in oven with the door open for ten minutes. Remove and let cool off, unmould, cut into thin slices and place them in a soup tureen. Peel and slice a small, sound cucumber, plunge it into a pint of boiling water with a half teaspoon salt for ten minutes. Drain, and place in the tureen, Strain the consomme through a cheesecloth on top and serve.
This is a clear consommé garnished with a baked tomato custard (a royale) and blanched cucumber. The custard is the whole job; the soup itself is only strained broth.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup. Two gills tomato sauce is 1 cup, reduced to about 1/3 cup; one gill cream is 1/2 cup, half a gill milk 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne is 1/8 teaspoon.
- The hinge: gentle heatA royale must set without bubbling or it turns grainy and weeps. Keep the water bath below a simmer; the book gives no temperature, and the open oven door is its way of holding the heat down. In a modern oven a low setting of around 300F works — pull the moulds the moment the centres are just firm to a light press.
- Ten minutes is optimisticSmall moulds of this size generally need 20 to 30 minutes at 300F in a bain-marie. Start checking at 15 and judge by set, not by clock.
- Reduce the tomato sauce hardReducing a cup to a third is what keeps the custard from being watery and slack. Let it cool before it meets the yolks, or you will curdle them.
- Strain twiceStrain the custard mixture through cheesecloth as directed, and strain the consommé again over the garnish. The point of the dish is absolute clarity around the coloured custard.
- Cool before unmouldingThe royale slices cleanly only when fully cold. Chill it, unmould, then cut into thin slices or small dice; ragged edges cloud the broth.
- The cucumberTen minutes in salted boiling water leaves it limp. Two to three minutes is enough to take the raw edge off while keeping some bite; drain well so it does not dilute the soup.
- YieldThree moulds serve three, or four small first-course portions. The recipe gives no quantity for the consomme itself.
Andalouse is one of the fixed garnish names of the French classical kitchen, and in soups it is generally associated with tomato — usually specified with rice and/or sweet pepper — the Andalusian association standing in for anything red and southern rather than for a specific Spanish dish. The tomato royale here is standard technique: a savoury baked custard, set in a water bath, chilled, and cut into slices or dice so that it holds its shape in hot broth. Consommés of this kind were the opening course of formal dinners in the hotel and restaurant cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a kitchen was judged on whether the broth arrived perfectly clear. The book gives quantities for three small moulds rather than a bulk yield.