Home › The World's Kitchen › Consomme, Imperatrice
Consomme, Imperatrice
Prepare a consomme. Strain through a napkin into a saucepan, adding three tablespoons well-drained canned asparagus tips, one quarter of small, previously cooked cauliflower (perfectly picked-off flower only) in small pieces, and one teaspoon fine sugar. Boil for five minutes, then add three tablespoons of the breast of a cooked chicken, if at hand, cut into very small dice pieces. Heat up for a minute, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup that assumes you already have a good consommé on hand; everything else is a five-minute assembly.
- The consommé is the whole dishWith only vegetables and diced chicken as garnish, nothing hides a weak or cloudy broth. Use a properly clarified stock, or reduce a good unsalted chicken or beef stock and clarify it with an egg-white raft before you start.
- Straining through a napkinThis means a doubled square of clean linen or muslin, wetted and wrung out, set in a sieve. A double layer of damp cheesecloth or a fine chinois does the same job; the point is to catch fat and fine sediment so the soup stays limpid.
- The five-minute boilBoil the consommé alone if you want it reduced, but the asparagus tips and cauliflower are already cooked and will collapse and cloud the broth. Bring the soup to a simmer, slip the garnish in, and give it a minute or two at most.
- Chicken breast lastCooked breast meat needs only to warm through. Held longer than a minute or so at a simmer it turns dry and stringy, and diced small it goes fast.
- The teaspoon of sugarSugar here takes the edge off cauliflower and canned asparagus. A pinch is enough, and it can be left out entirely.
- Canned asparagus tipsDrain and rinse them, since the packing liquid is salty and will muddy a clear soup. Frozen or fresh tips, blanched briefly and refreshed in cold water, hold their shape better.
- "Perfectly picked-off flower only"Break the cooked cauliflower into individual florets and trim away every trace of stalk, so the pieces are small enough to fit on a spoon and uniform in the bowl.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much consommé it garnishes; the quantities given are light, and suit roughly a quart. Warm the tureen and the bowls; a clear soup this thin loses heat immediately.
Consommés in the grand-hotel repertoire were named rather than described, and the name told the cook which garnish to use — Brunoise for diced vegetables, Célestine for shredded crêpes. The convention is generally traced to French professional kitchens and was carried into English-language books like this one, where a single mother stock was expected in the larder and the individual soups were built from it in minutes. That expectation explains the recipe's brevity, and also its casual "if at hand" for the chicken breast. The choice of canned asparagus is worth noting too, since canned vegetables were by then respectable enough to appear in a dish named for an empress.