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Consomme, Brunoise
Strain a consomme, into another saucepan and keep warm. Have one medium red carrot, one medium turnip, one small white onion, two leeks and two branches celery. Cut all these vegetables in exceedingly small dice-pieces and place in a small saucepan with a teaspoon salt, one teaspoon sugar, two gills hot water and half ounce butter. Mix well with a wooden spoon; cover the vegetables with a piece of lightly buttered paper, cover the pan, boil for five minutes on the range, then place in the oven to braise for thirty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper and add all the vegetables to the consomme, with three tablespoons boiled and well-drained rice and two tablespoons fresh peas; boil on the range for five minutes. Skim the fat from the surface of the consomme, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A classical clear soup with a vegetable garnish, written for a kitchen that already had consommé on the stove. The work is all in the knife.
- Brunoise means the cut"Exceedingly small dice" is about 1/8 inch, cut evenly so everything braises at the same rate. Uneven dice give you mush and raw fragments in the same spoonful, and in a clear soup there is nothing to hide behind.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of hot water. That is enough to keep the vegetables moist under the paper without leaving a pool of thin liquid to dilute the finished consommé.
- Salt and sugarA full teaspoon of salt in a cup of water is heavy, and your consommé is already seasoned. Use a pinch or two and correct the soup at the end instead. The teaspoon of sugar is there to help the carrot and turnip glaze rather than to sweeten anything.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment, buttered side down, laid directly on the vegetables inside the covered pan. It traps steam against them so they braise in their own moisture rather than frying at the bottom or drying at the top.
- Oven heatThe recipe does not name an oven temperature. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F, will suit; thirty minutes should leave the dice tender but still holding their shape, so check at twenty.
- Rice and peas go in lastThe rice is boiled separately and drained precisely so its starch does not cloud the consommé. Add both at the end and give them only the five minutes stated; fresh peas need barely that, and frozen peas need less than a minute to heat through.
- SkimmingThe half ounce of butter from the braise will surface as fat. Draw it off with a spoon or a strip of paper towel across the surface, or the soup arrives with a slick on it.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much consomme is involved; the garnish as written would suit roughly 1 1/2 quarts, enough for about six as a first course. Warm the tureen and the bowls, since a clear soup with this little body loses heat fast.
Brunoise is one of the classical French garnishes that entered English-language cookbooks in the late nineteenth century, when hotel and restaurant kitchens in New York and London were staffed and largely written by French-trained cooks. The name is generally traced to Brunoy, near Paris, though the connection is traditional rather than documented; in practice it came to mean both the fine dice itself and any clear soup finished with it. The method here, sweating vegetables under a buttered paper with butter, sugar and a little water, is a standard classical braise for a soup garnish, kept separate from the consomme so that nothing clouds a broth that has been clarified with eggs and lean meat.