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Consomme, Lyonnaise
Prepare a consomme strain into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Peel twelve very small white onions, place in sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter, teaspoon sugar, cook until a nice golden colour all around, tossing once in a while, lift up with skimmer and add to consomme. Cut three canned artichoke bottoms in half-inch-square pieces, add also to consomme, pour in two tablespoons sherry, boil for five minutes, pour consomme into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnish soup rather than a recipe from scratch: everything depends on a clear consommé you have already made, and on not clouding it at the last minute. The additions take about fifteen minutes once the broth is hot.
- The base is assumedThe recipe simply says "prepare a consomme" and expects you to have one ready: a clarified meat broth, strained clear. A good commercial clear beef broth will stand in, but the point of the dish is transparency, so anything cloudy defeats it.
- Don't let it boil hardThe recipe says to boil for five minutes once the garnish is in; keep that boil gentle. A hard rolling boil will lift sediment and turn a clear consomme grey, so hold it at a bare shiver and skim any fat that rises.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided pan, wider than a saucepan and lower than a stockpot — a modern sauté pan is exactly right. The wide base is what lets twelve onions colour in a single layer.
- Glazing the onionsA tablespoon of butter and a teaspoon of sugar over medium-low heat for 12–15 minutes, shaking rather than stirring, so they colour evenly and stay whole. A splash of the consommé in the pan at the end will loosen the caramel; add that to the soup too.
- Small white onionsPearl or boiling onions, about 1 inch across. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save the tedium; blanch fresh ones for a minute and the skins slip off.
- Canned artichoke bottomsStill sold, usually in brine and often near the olives; drain and rinse them well or the brine will carry into the broth. Quartered canned artichoke hearts are the common substitute, though they shed leaves and muddy the clarity.
- The sherryDry -- fino or amontillado, not cream sherry. It goes in at the end so the aroma survives; two tablespoons is a seasoning, not a flavour base, and the recipe never states how much consomme it is seasoning.
- YieldThe recipe gives no volume of consomme and no serving count; twelve onions and three artichoke bottoms suggest a garnish for a modest tureen rather than a large one.
"Lyonnaise" on a French menu means onions, and it means them almost without exception — Lyon and the Rhône valley are generally associated with onion cookery, and by the nineteenth century the term had hardened into kitchen shorthand that chefs could rely on across any menu written in French. Filippini's book catalogues consommés by garnish rather than by stock: the clarified broth is a single standing preparation, and a dozen named soups are struck off it by dropping in royale, profiteroles, julienned vegetables or, here, glazed onions and artichoke. The canned artichoke bottoms are the modern touch of their moment — tinned French vegetables were an ordinary hotel-kitchen staple by the turn of the century, and they sit oddly beside a recipe that otherwise reads like classical practice.