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Consomme, Diablotin
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering. Cut from a stale sandwich loaf six quarter-inch-thick slices and toast them to a light colour. Mix on a plate two ounces grated Parmesan cheese with two saltspoons cayenne, then evenly spread cheese, etc., on the six toasts. Place toasts on a baking sheet, set in oven for six minutes or till a nice golden colour. Remove, cut them into small lozenge pieces, pour the consomme into a soup tureen, place diablotin on top and serve.
A clear soup with a cheese-toast garnish. The recipe assumes you already have consommé on hand and gives no oven temperature, so a few numbers need filling in.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is about half a teaspoon against two ounces of cheese. That is genuinely fierce; a quarter teaspoon gives the intended prickle without scorching the soup.
- Oven heatNone is specified. Around 400F on an upper rack browns the cheese in the six minutes given. A broiler works faster but needs watching, as grated Parmesan goes from gold to bitter in under a minute.
- Stale sandwich loafThis means a close-crumbed white tin loaf a day or two old, not a rustic open-crumbed bread. Day-old bread cuts cleanly at a quarter inch and does not sag under the cheese; fresh bread will tear and go soggy in the soup.
- Toast first, then topThe bread is toasted light before the cheese goes on. Skipping that step leaves the centre of each slice damp, and the diablotins collapse on contact with the consommé.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself from a wedge. Pre-grated cheese sold with anti-caking agents browns unevenly and tends to stay powdery rather than melting into a sheet.
- Lozenge piecesCut on the diagonal into diamonds roughly an inch across, done while the toast is still warm and pliable enough not to shatter.
- ServingSix slices cut into lozenges will garnish roughly six bowls, though the recipe does not say how many it serves. Float the diablotins at the last moment, at the table if possible, since they soften within a minute or two and the point of them is the contrast against the clear broth.
- The consommé itselfThe recipe presumes a properly clarified stock, held at a bare simmer so it stays bright. Boiling it hard at this stage clouds the liquid and undoes the clarification.
Diablotin is French for "little devil," and in nineteenth-century cookery the name was attached to dishes sharpened with cayenne and similar heat — the same broad logic behind English "devilled" kidneys and devilled ham. In the classic French repertoire diablotins are small cheese toasts served with clear soups, one of a large family of consommé garnishes that were catalogued and named with great precision in professional kitchens of the period; a consommé was rarely sent out plain, and the garnish frequently supplied the dish's name on the menu. The recipe's assumption that a cook simply has consommé simmering says a good deal about the kind of kitchen the book was written for.