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Consomme, Magenta
Prepare, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering a consomme. With a very small Parisian scoop, scoop out as many round pieces as you can from two medium carrots, two white turnips and two medium, sound, peeled raw potatoes; boil latter in a pint water with half teaspoon salt fifteen minutes, drain and keep hot. Add the carrots and turnips to the consomme with one gill green peas and half pint tomato sauce. Boil slowly forty-five minutes, then add potatoes with leaves from one branch parsley and one branch chervil, cook five minutes longer, remove, pour the consomme into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup that lives or dies on the broth: the recipe assumes you already have a well-clarified consomme on the stove, and everything else is decoration.
- The hinge: keep it clearCook the vegetables at a bare simmer, as the recipe's own "boil slowly" implies; hard boiling and loose starch will cloud a consomme you took trouble to clarify. The potatoes are cooked separately in salted water, which has the same effect, though the recipe does not say that is why.
- A gillHalf a cup, so about 2–3 oz of green peas. Frozen peas are fine here and should go in for the last two or three minutes rather than at the start.
- Parisian scoopA melon baller; the recipe calls for a very small one, so use the smallest you have, around 10-15 mm. If you have none, cut the vegetables into even 1 cm dice; the point is uniform pieces that cook at the same rate.
- Forty-five minutes is too longSmall carrot and turnip balls are tender in 8-12 minutes at a simmer. Taste and stop when they yield.
- Tomato sauceHalf a pint here means a thin, sieved cooked tomato sauce, not a thick modern pasta sauce or ketchup. Passata reduced slightly, or a light tomato coulis, keeps the soup translucent; anything floury or heavily seasoned will muddy both colour and clarity.
- Why "Magenta"The tomato is there for colour as much as flavour. Add it gradually and judge by eye — the finished soup should be a clear rose, not opaque red.
- ChervilDelicate, anise-scented, and rarely stocked. Substitute a little tarragon plus extra parsley, and add it late or off the heat, since chervil's aroma fades quickly with cooking.
- YieldThe recipe never says how much consomme to prepare, so the yield depends entirely on that; the garnish suits roughly 4 to 6 first-course servings. Warm the tureen and bowls; a clear soup at lukewarm tastes of nothing.
Nineteenth-century French kitchens named consommes by their garnish, and the names read like a catalogue of the period's enthusiasms — places, generals, opera singers, battles. Magenta is generally taken as one of the battle names: the Franco-Sardinian victory over Austria at Magenta in June 1859, which also gave its name to the brilliant aniline red patented as fuchsine earlier that year and renamed after the battle, when the new coal-tar colours were the marvel of the age. Whether the soup was christened for the battle or for the dye, the logic is the same: the tomato tints an otherwise colourless broth, and the kitchen took its name from the tint. Books of this kind, compiled for American households with continental pretensions around the turn of the twentieth century, are said to have carried a great many such consommes, each differing from the next only in what was scooped, diced or floated in it — evidence of how much prestige a properly clarified stock carried on a formal menu.