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Consomme, Bonsselet
Prepare a consomme strain into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Cut two ounces raw beef marrow in small squares, place in a bowl with half teaspoon salt, pour over two gills boiling water, let stand for six minutes, lift up with skimmer and place in soup tureen. Cut one ounce smoked beef tongue in small square pieces and add consomme with two tablespoons cooked green peas, pour consomme into soup tureen and serve with six slices toasted French bread.
A garnish soup: the consommé does the work, and the assembly happens in the tureen at the last minute. Everything hinges on the marrow being set but not melted.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of boiling water is one cup — just enough to cover 2 oz of diced marrow in a bowl. The six-minute steep firms the cubes so they hold their shape; leave them longer and they slump into fat on the surface of the soup.
- Sourcing the marrowAsk a butcher for split beef marrow bones, or for canoe-cut bones, and push the marrow out with your thumb. Chill it hard before dicing, or it smears. Two ounces is roughly the yield of one or two large shank bones.
- The consomméThe recipe assumes you already have a clarified beef consommé from elsewhere in the book. It must be genuinely clear and well seasoned — this soup is nothing but broth plus three garnishes, so any cloudiness or flatness shows. No quantity of consommé is given; something in the region of a quart and a half would suit six.
- Smoked beef tongueSold cooked and sliced at good delis; smoked tongue is usually saltier than plain boiled, so hold back on salting the consommé until the tongue is in. The recipe says only 'small square pieces' — cut them so they match the marrow and peas.
- PeasTwo tablespoons of cooked green peas for the whole tureen is a scattering rather than a vegetable garnish. Frozen peas dropped into boiling water for a minute are closer to the intended sweetness than canned.
- Assembly orderThe marrow goes into the tureen first; the tongue and peas are added to the consommé, which is then poured over. Do not simmer the marrow in the soup — it will render out and grease the surface.
- The bread'Toasted French bread' here means slices toasted or dried until crisp; the recipe specifies no oven or temperature. Served alongside, not floated in the bowl.
- YieldSix slices of bread suggests six servings.
Nineteenth-century French service produced dozens of named consommés, each distinguished only by its garnish — the broth stayed constant and the two or three things dropped into the tureen supplied the name. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) runs through a long sequence of them, and this one, with marrow, tongue and peas, is of a kind: brief, formulaic, written for a cook who already has stock on the stove. The marrow garnish is the older element, marrow having been prized in European cookery long before consommé was clarified into its modern form; the smoked tongue reflects an era when a whole cured tongue was a normal thing to have in the larder and its trimmings had to be used. Names of this sort were often coined for a patron, a chef or a restaurant, and the origin of many of them is now untraceable.