Home › The World's Kitchen › Consomme, Chatelaine
Consomme, Chatelaine
Prepare and strain a consomme into another saucepan. Place one finely minced white onion in a saucepan with half pint milk, three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and let boil fifteen minutes. Place one whole egg and the yolk of another in a bowl with a tablespoon cream; sharply mix with the whisk, then gradually add the milk and onions, whisking meanwhile. Strain through a cheesecloth into three lightly buttered pudding moulds, place in a small frying pan, pour hot water up to half their height, then set in oven with the door open ten minutes. Remove, let get cold, unmould, then cut in slices a fifth of an inch thick, place in a soup tureen with three tablespoons cooked green peas and three tablespoons cooked string beans cut in very small pieces, pour the boiling consomme over and serve.
This is a clear soup with a savoury custard garnish — what classical kitchens call a royale. The custard is the whole job; the consommé is assumed to be already made.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe custard must set without boiling, or it turns grainy and weeps. The recipe gives no temperature, only a water bath and an open oven door — the period's way of bleeding off heat; a low oven (in modern terms, somewhere around 300-325F) and a close eye do the same. Pull the moulds when the centres are just firm.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So three-quarters teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon cayenne and a quarter teaspoon nutmeg for one cup of milk. The cayenne is assertive at that rate; an eighth of a teaspoon suits most palates.
- Half pint milkOne cup. Whole milk, not skim — the fat matters to the set and the slicing.
- Moulds"Pudding moulds" here means small individual ones: three 4-ounce ramekins or dariole moulds. A single large mould gives a custard too thick to slice neatly.
- Strain, then strain againThe onion is there for flavour only and is removed by the cheesecloth. Straining the finished mixture also catches any thread of cooked egg, which is what keeps the slices smooth-faced.
- Chill before cuttingCold custard cuts; warm custard tears. Refrigerate the unmoulded rounds at least two hours, then slice a scant quarter inch thick with a thin blade wiped between cuts. Cut into diamonds or small squares if you want the classic look.
- Assembly and timingEverything but the consommé is cold, so the broth must be at a hard boil going into the tureen and the soup served at once. Add the custard and vegetables to warm plates or the tureen last; they will not survive being stirred about.
- YieldThree moulds; the recipe does not say how much consomme to prepare, but a quart would serve four to six as a first course.
A royale — seasoned custard baked in a water bath, chilled, and cut into shapes to float in clear soup — was one of the standard garnishes of the nineteenth-century French repertoire, and a way of showing off a consommé rather than filling it up. Named consommé garnishes ran into the hundreds in restaurant kitchens of this period, each title signalling a fixed set of additions to cooks who had learned them by rote; à la châtelaine is generally associated with a country-house or "lady of the manor" style, though the exact garnish varies from book to book, and here it means the onion royale with peas and cut string beans.