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Consomme, Imperial
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering. Plunge twelve cocks' Kidneys in boiling water for two minutes, remove and add to consomme, with a small truffle cut in julienne strips, three tablespoons cooked green peas, a quenelles garnishing, boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a garnish formula rather than a soup recipe: the work is in the consommé you make first, and the named garnish is dropped in at the last moment. Everything below assumes a well-clarified beef or chicken consommé already in hand.
- Cocks' kidneysIn classical French kitchens rognons de coq are the testicles of the bird, not the kidneys — a pale, firm, mild organ. They are effectively unobtainable at ordinary retail now; a specialist poulterer is the likeliest source. Small poached chicken quenelles or blanched sweetbread dice would stand in.
- The blanch mattersTwo minutes in boiling water sets the outside and firms the texture so the garnish stays whole and pale in the clear soup. Skip it and the pieces cloud the consommé you just spent an hour clarifying.
- Keep the consommé clear"Keep simmering" means a bare shiver, not a rolling boil; hard boiling clouds a strained consommé. Note that the recipe nonetheless says to boil the garnish for five minutes.
- QuenellesChicken or veal forcemeat bound with egg white and cream, shaped in two teaspoons and poached separately in salted water until they float, then added. Poach them in the consommé itself and you will muddy it.
- TruffleA small black winter truffle, cut into matchsticks; preserved truffle in a jar is the practical option. The recipe adds it before the five-minute boil, though prolonged simmering costs aroma.
- Peas"Cooked green peas" is not specified further; blanched and refreshed peas, or frozen petits pois dropped in at the last minute, suit a clear soup better than anything cooked to softness.
Named garnishes are the grammar of classical consommé: the base is always the same clear broth, and the name on the menu tells the kitchen exactly what goes into the tureen. Consommé impériale is generally listed with cocks' kidneys, truffle, quenelles and green peas, a combination of costly and fiddly items — truffles, hand-shaped forcemeat, an organ that took a great many birds to collect. Cocks' kidneys appear routinely in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-French cookery and then disappear almost entirely from twentieth-century books. That this formula sits in a general-purpose international cook book, alongside far plainer fare, shows how far the vocabulary of the professional restaurant kitchen had spread into ambitious domestic cooking.