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Consomme Au Cerfeuilles
Prepare a consomme and and strain into another saucepan. Thoroughly wash three branches chervil, detach leaves from branches and add to consomme, then boil for five minutes. Cut crust off a three-inch piece sandwich bread and cut crusts into small, even, lozenge-shaped pieces, place on a tin, set in oven for five minutes, remove, place in soup tureen, pour consomme over and serve.
A garnished clear soup that stands or falls on the quality of the consommé and the freshness of the chervil. Two details in the original need attention: the boiling time for the herb and the ambiguity about which part of the bread is used.
- The chervil is the hingeChervil's delicate anise note is volatile and five minutes of boiling flattens it into hay. Add the leaves to the strained consomme off the heat, cover, and let them steep 1-2 minutes before serving; if you want them cooked, 30 seconds at a bare simmer is enough. Three branches amounts to only a small handful of leaves; the recipe does not say how much consomme it is for.
- "Prepare a consomme"The recipe assumes a clarified stock made elsewhere. A good long-simmered stock, clarified with egg white and raft or simply strained very carefully through a cloth, is the point; a cloudy stock defeats the dish. Commercial boxed broth will not give the same clarity or body.
- Strain properlyStrain through a fine sieve lined with dampened muslin or a coffee filter, and skim every trace of fat from the surface with paper towel. Fat beads on a clear soup are the one flaw guests notice.
- Which bread, and what shapeThe instruction is contradictory as printed: it says to cut the crust off, then to cut "the crusts" into lozenges. The sensible reading is to trim off and discard the crust and cut the crumb into small diamonds.
- Oven for the croutonsThe recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 375F, for the five minutes stated gives lightly dried, pale croutons rather than browned ones; turn them once. For golden croutons, a hotter oven and a little longer, watching closely, since small pieces burn fast.
- Assembly and timingPut the croutons in the warmed tureen and pour the hot soup over immediately before serving. Left to sit, they turn to paste, which is presumably why the original gives the steps in this order.
- If you cannot find chervilFresh chervil is a short-season herb and rarely stocked. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the usual stand-in, though the result is a different soup and should not be called au cerfeuil.
The name is French kitchen shorthand: a consomme garnished with chervil (cerfeuil), one of many such named clear soups in nineteenth-century French service, where the same base stock was distinguished largely by its garnish and given a separate name on the menu. Chervil belongs to that repertoire and is one of the four herbs of the classic fines herbes mixture, mild enough not to fight a delicate broth. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, who had cooked at Delmonico's in New York; it presents this sort of professional formula as one of a run of variations, assuming the reader has consomme already made. The lozenge cut is a mark of that professional training, garnishes being cut to a regular shape.