Home › The World's Kitchen › Consomme, Deslignac
Consomme, Deslignac
Prepare a consomme, straining it into another saucepan; keep it simmering. Crack in a bowl one egg, adding the yolk of another diluted with a gill hot consomme. Lightly butter two small pudding moulds; strain this preparation through a cheesecloth into the two moulds, place them in a small tin with hot water up to half their height and bake in the open oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, let cool off, unmould, cut the custard into thin slices, then add them to the consomme; add also three tablespoons of canned or cooked green peas, heat up a minute, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a clear soup with a royale garnish — a savoury egg custard baked in a water bath, chilled, sliced and dropped into the broth at the last moment. The custard is the whole dish, and it fails in only one way: too much heat.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Here it is the hot consommé used to loosen the egg yolk before the mixture goes through the cheesecloth.
- "The open oven"Period shorthand for a gentle, slack heat; the phrase is sometimes taken to mean the oven with its door propped ajar, though the book does not explain it. A rough modern equivalent is 300-325F. Fifteen minutes in a water bath at that heat should just set two small moulds; the custard should barely tremble at the centre and show no bubbles or weeping.
- The hinge: never let the bath boilIf the water around the moulds simmers, the royale curdles and will crumble instead of slicing. Use hot, not boiling, water and check the moulds at twelve minutes.
- Egg proportionsOne whole egg plus one extra yolk to half a cup of liquid gives a firm, sliceable custard rather than a spoonable one. That firmness is deliberate — a soft royale disintegrates in the tureen.
- Strain, and mean itPassing the egg mixture through cheesecloth removes the chalazae and any thread of coagulated white, which would otherwise show as blemishes in the finished slices. Skim any foam off the surface in the moulds before baking.
- Cool completely before unmouldingWarm royale tears. Let the moulds sit until fully cool, then run a thin knife around the edge and turn out. Cut with a wet knife into slices about a quarter-inch thick, or into dice or lozenges.
- The peas and the final heatCanned or already-cooked peas need only to warm through; a minute in the simmering consommé is the whole instruction. Add the custard slices at the same moment and do not let the pot return to a boil, or the garnish will break up and cloud the soup.
- The consommé itselfThe recipe assumes you have already clarified a good beef or chicken consommé and strained it. Keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered, and taste for salt before the garnish goes in — nothing can be corrected afterwards.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two small pudding moulds produce enough sliced garnish for a small tureen of consomme, on the order of four first-course servings.
Consomme garnished with sliced egg custard is consomme a la royale, one of the foundation garnishes of French restaurant cookery, and the long lists of named consommes in books of this period — each distinguished only by what floats in it — draw on the classical repertoire that Escoffier and his contemporaries codified. A name like "Deslignac" identifies the combination rather than describing it: royale plus green peas, and a cook who knew the code needed no further explanation. That such lists appear in a general household book of this period says something about the ambitions of the era, when hotel and restaurant French was filtering into domestic kitchens; it also explains the brevity here, since the reader is expected to already know how to clarify a consomme.