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Consomme Aux Profiteroles
Prepare and strain a consomme and keep hot. Place in a saucepan one and a half gills cold milk, one ounce butter and a saltspoon salt, and let boil; add three ounces sifted flour, briskly stir with the wooden spoon for two minutes, then stand the pan on the table; break in one egg, sharply mix for a minute, break in another egg, sharply mix again, repeat with another egg, add a saltspoon cayenne pepper and one ounce grated Parmesan cheese and mix for one minute. Make a cornet with a sheet of white paper, drop the paste in the cornet and cut off a small piece of the paper at the point to make an opening one-fifth inch in diameter. Press down the preparation into a pastry tin, to the form of dried white beans; place in the oven for ten minutes, remove, place in a soup tureen, pour the consomme over and serve.
This is unsweetened choux paste piped into pea-sized puffs and floated in clear soup. The paste itself is straightforward; the fussy parts are the archaic measures and an oven temperature the original never gives.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- Weights, not cupsThree ounces of sifted flour is roughly 3/4 cup, and an ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Choux is a ratio dough — weigh it if you can, since a heaped cup of flour will give a paste too stiff to pipe.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Puffs this small want a hot oven — around 425F is a reasonable modern equivalent — for the ten minutes stated; at a moderate heat they are more likely to dry out than to rise.
- The cayenneA saltspoon of cayenne — a full 1/4 teaspoon in a small batch of paste — is aggressive by modern palates. A pinch is closer to what a delicate consomm":"e can carry.
- The paper cornetThis is a piping bag improvised from a rolled cone of paper, as the recipe specifies. The opening it describes is about 1/5 inch; a disposable bag fitted with a plain round tip of roughly that diameter does the same job.
- "Press down into a pastry tin"Pipe the paste onto a baking sheet rather than into a mould. "To the form of dried white beans" is the size guide: little ovals, well spaced, since they expand in the oven.
- Assemble at the tableBake the puffs, keep them dry and warm, and pour the hot consomme over them only as the tureen goes out; left sitting in the liquid they soften quickly.
- YieldThe paste makes on the order of a hundred tiny puffs, enough garnish for perhaps six to eight cups of consomme at roughly a dozen per serving. Leftover baked puffs keep a day in a tin and can be crisped in the oven.
The word profiterole was in French use for a small baked item long before it attached itself to the ice-cream-filled dessert the term now suggests in English. Flavouring choux paste with grated Parmesan and dropping it into clear soup is standard nineteenth-century French garnish practice, of a piece with the marrow quenelles, royales and profiteroles listed in the classical repertoire of consommes, and the puffs are there for texture and richness in a soup deliberately stripped of both.