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Consomme, Colbert
Prepare and strain in a saucepan a consomme, then keep it simmering until required. Cut in thin, one-inch-long julienne strips one red, peeled medium carrot and one turnip, two small white onions, the white parts of two leeks, two branches celery and one sound seeded green pepper; place these in a small saucepan with half teaspoon salt, half saltspoon sugar, half ounce butter and one gill of the consomme; mix well, cover vegetables with lightly buttered paper, cover the pan, set in oven forty-five minutes, remove, pour all the contents of the pan into the consomme with the leaves of two branches of chervil, boil five minutes, pour into soup tureen, add six freshly prepared, well-trimmed poached eggs and serve.
A clear consommé garnished with a brunoise-fine julienne and a poached egg per person. Everything hangs on keeping the broth transparent and the eggs soft.
- Never let the consommé boil hardOnce clarified and strained, it should barely shiver. A rolling boil drives fat and fine particles back into suspension and the clarity you worked for is gone. The five-minute boil at the end is better read as five minutes at a bare simmer.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. That is all the liquid the vegetables get; they braise rather than boil, which is the point.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon of sugar. It is there to round the carrot and turnip, not to sweeten the soup.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Braise the julienne at a moderate 325-350F; at higher heat the small liquid volume evaporates and the strips scorch against the pan.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered side down, laid directly on the vegetables. It traps steam at the surface and keeps the exposed strips from drying while they cook through.
- Julienne disciplineOne inch long and genuinely thin, matchstick or finer, cut to uniform size. In a clear soup the garnish is the only thing to look at, and ragged or crumbling pieces spoil the look of the bowl.
- The eggsPoach them separately in acidulated water, soft, then trim the ragged skirts of white with scissors or a round cutter so they sit clean in the broth. Add them to the tureen at the last second; held in hot consommé they keep cooking and the yolk sets.
- ChervilFragile and hard to find fresh; its anise-parsley note fades quickly with heat, so add the leaves at the very end. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is a common substitute.
- YieldSix, one egg each. The recipe never says how much consomme to prepare; allowing a generous cup to a cup and a half per serving puts the batch somewhere between a quart and a half and two and a quarter quarts.
Dishes labelled a la Colbert in the French repertoire are named for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, in the same commemorative spirit that gave the kitchen Bechamel and Mornay; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the naming came long after the man. In classical usage the tag covers more than one preparation — a compound butter with lemon, parsley and meat glaze, a sole split and boned and fried — but in the soup section Colbert means specifically a clear consomme with a fine vegetable julienne and a poached egg in each portion. That egg is what separates it from a plain consomme julienne, and it accounts for the insistence on well-trimmed eggs: a torn white in a transparent broth shows at once. The green pepper is not part of the classical French garnish, which stays with root vegetables, leek and celery.