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Consomme, Flamande
Prepare, strain in a saucepan and keep hot a consomme. Clean and scrape a medium red carrot, one medium turnip; wash well quarter of a small, well-trimmed white cabbage. Cut all these into small dice pieces. Finely mince a medium white onion, place in a small saucepan with a teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon salt, half ounce butter and half pint cold water; mix thoroughly, cover the vegetables with a sheet of buttered paper, cover pan and boil on the range for forty-five minutes. Remove, take up the paper and add the vegetables to the consomme with six well-washed, drained and minced sorrel leaves, if handy. Boil the consomme for ten minutes. Have six small slices lightly toasted French bread, place them in a soup tureen, pour the consomme over and serve.
A classic garnished consommé: clear broth finished with a small brunoise of root vegetables and cabbage. Two things in the text need untangling before you start.
- Which vegetables go in the panAs written, only the onion is directed into the small saucepan, yet the recipe later refers to "the vegetables" in the plural. The intent is that the diced carrot, turnip and cabbage all go in with the minced onion, butter, sugar, salt and water. Read it that way.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on one side and laid directly on the vegetables. It traps steam and keeps the dice from drying or colouring. Parchment is the modern stand-in for the old buttered kitchen paper.
- "Boil on the range for forty-five minutes"The pan is lidded and papered, which holds much of the liquid, but half a pint at a rolling boil for forty-five minutes risks the pan going dry. Hold it at a bare simmer so the liquid reduces to a glaze and the dice stay intact; check once or twice and add a spoonful of water if needed.
- Small dice means smallFor a consommé garnish the vegetables should be a brunoise, roughly 1/8 inch. Anything larger reads as vegetable soup rather than a clear garnished broth, and the cabbage in particular should be shredded fine.
- SorrelA sharp, lemony leaf, seasonal and now more often found at farmers' markets than in supermarkets; the original marks it optional with "if handy." It collapses almost instantly in hot liquid, so add it near the end rather than at the start of the ten minutes. Without it the soup is milder but still correct.
- The final ten minutesBoiling a finished consommé hard will cloud it, undoing the clarification. Bring it up to a gentle simmer for the ten minutes instead, and skim any fat that rises.
- MeasuresHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; half a pint is one cup. The recipe gives no quantity for the consomme itself; the six slices of bread imply six portions.
- The breadCut it thin, on a slight bias, and toast it dry rather than buttered. The recipe has you lay the toast in the tureen and pour the consomme over it just before serving; toast left sitting in hot broth goes to paste within a few minutes.
In the classical French repertoire a consomm"00e9 is named for its garnish, and ""e0 la flamande" " in7f in the Flemish manner " signals the root vegetables and cabbage that anchor the cooking of Flanders and northern Belgium. The dice are given their own pan with butter, sugar and a little water so that each vegetable is glazed and seasoned separately before it meets the broth, a technique that keeps the consomm"00e9 clear and lets the garnish taste of itself rather than of the pot. Filippini's book, written out of the kitchens of New York's Delmonico's, catalogues such consomm"00e9s under their regional names, which is how a combination of carrot, turnip and cabbage arrives in an American cookbook as a formal first course. Sorrel, listed here as optional, was a common kitchen-garden green in the nineteenth century.