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Consomme, Bourgeoise
Prepare and strain a consomme into another saucepan. Scoop out with a very small Parisian potato scoop two carrots and two turnips, place them in a small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter, three saltspoons salt, three saltspoons sugar, one saltspoon white pepper and one gill water; cover the pan and set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove and add to the consomme with three tablespoons cooked string beans cut into small pieces, adding one teaspoon sugar. Mix well, boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup that assumes you already have consommé on hand; the recipe is really about the vegetable garnish. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are period ones.
- Start with the consomméStart with the consomme -- The recipe presumes a made, clarified consomme from elsewhere in the book; no quantity or yield is given, so scale the broth to the garnish (a couple of quarts is a reasonable working guess). Good boxed or homemade clear stock works, but it should be genuinely clear, since the whole point of the dish is transparency behind the vegetables.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fl oz. That is the braising liquid for the carrots and turnips.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons salt is roughly ¾ teaspoon, and one saltspoon white pepper about ¼ teaspoon.
- Parisian potato scoopA melon baller; the recipe calls for a very small one, so use the smallest cutter you have. The vegetables should be uniform pearls; irregular chunks look wrong floating in clear broth. Trimmings go into the next batch of stock.
- Oven temperatureUnstated in the recipe. Set 325-350F and cover the pan tightly; the butter, sugar and half-cup of water should glaze the pearls rather than boil dry. Check at 25 minutes -- forty is a long time for small vegetable balls, and turnip especially will collapse.
- The sweetnessBetween the braising sugar and the teaspoon added at the end, this is a noticeably sweet consommé, in the older French manner of drawing out root vegetables. Halve the final teaspoon or leave it out if that is not to your taste.
- The final boilFive minutes at a boil is more than the garnish needs and will cloud a carefully clarified consommé. Bring it barely to a simmer, hold two or three minutes to heat the beans through, and serve.
- String beansCooked and cut small — blanch them separately in salted water until just tender and refresh in cold water, so the green stays bright in the bowl.
Bourgeoise in French kitchen language means plain or household -- cooked as a family would rather than in the grand style -- and it is commonly associated with a garnish of glazed root vegetables, most familiarly in bœuf à la bourgeoise. Applied to a consommé the label is a small joke on itself, since clarifying a broth with egg white and lean beef is among the least homely operations in the repertoire. Its presence here reflects how classified garnishes worked in the professional kitchens Escoffier's generation codified: one carefully made consommé became a dozen menu items depending only on what was dropped into it, and cookbooks of the period reproduced those lists for households that had adopted the vocabulary of the restaurant. The melon-baller pearls are the tell -- a purely visual refinement, and the sort of finish a cook was expected to produce by hand before shaped frozen vegetables existed.