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Consomme Brunoise with Barley
Prepare, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering a consomme. Boil two ounces barley in a pint of water with half a teaspoon salt fifty minutes. Drain and wash in cold water, then add to the consomme. Cut a medium carrot, one turnip, one onion, one leek and a quarter of a very small cabbage in exceedingly, small square pieces. Place in a small saucepan with half an ounce butter, three gills of the consomme, three saltspoons salt and three saltspoons sugar. Cover vegetables with lightly buttered paper, place lid on pan, then cook on range twenty minutes. Set in oven fifteen minutes. Remove, add vegetables to the consomme, boil five minutes. Pour the consomme into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic garnished consommé: the clear broth is the dish, and everything else is handled so as not to cloud it. Two details carry the whole recipe — washing the barley and keeping the vegetables in a covered, barely-moist braise rather than a boil.
- Why the barley is washedPearl barley sheds starch as it cooks, and starch is what turns a clear consommé cloudy. Boil it separately, drain it, and rinse under cold water until the water runs clear before it goes anywhere near the broth.
- Barley type and timingTwo ounces is a scant third of a cup. Fifty minutes suits the barley of the period; modern pearl barley may come tender sooner, so taste rather than trust the clock. Hulled or pot barley will need longer.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is about 1 1/2 cups of consommé for the braise. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three of them is 3/4 teaspoon salt and 3/4 teaspoon sugar.
- Brunoise means the knife workBrunoise is a dice of about 1/8 inch — the "exceedingly small square pieces" are the point of the name. Cut the vegetables into even batons first, then across; uneven dice will cook at different rates and look wrong floating in clear broth.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the diameter of the pan, buttered on one side and laid directly on the vegetables. It traps steam against them so they cook in very little liquid without browning or breaking up.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature and gives no descriptor such as 'moderate'; period ranges rarely carried a reliable gauge. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for the final fifteen minutes; the vegetables are already nearly cooked and only need to finish gently.
- Keep the cabbage in checkA quarter of a very small cabbage is perhaps a cup diced. Cabbage and leek dominate a clear soup quickly, so err toward less, and skim any fat from the surface before serving.
- YieldWith a quart to six cups of consommé, this serves four to six as a first course. Serve immediately once the vegetables go in; long standing softens the dice and dulls the broth.
Brunoise is French kitchen shorthand for a fine, even dice of root vegetables and the garnish made from it, and the classical repertoire of the late nineteenth century catalogued dozens of such consommés — each named for whatever was floating in it. Filippini's book belongs to that world: he had worked at Delmonico's in New York, where a *carte* might list a dozen clear soups distinguished only by garnish, and where the ability to send out a genuinely transparent consommé was a measure of the kitchen. The barley here is the older, plainer note. Pearl barley thickened European soups for centuries, and in a Franco-American restaurant soup it would have been cooked separately, rinsed clean of its starch, and admitted to the tureen only once it could no longer cloud the broth.