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Consomme, Portugaise
Prepare a consomme, strain into another pan and keep simmering. Soak eighteen prunes in cold water during night, drain on sieve, then place in small saucepan with an ounce sugar, half a cinnamon stick, one pint water, cover pan and let boil for fifteen minutes, then keep hot. Cut white parts of two leeks in julienne-shaped strips, place in a saucepan with teaspoon melted butter and brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Pour in two gills of the consomme, let cook until nearly dry, add leeks, drain the prunes and also add, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear soup finished with two garnishes cooked separately: glazed leek julienne and spiced prunes. Nothing is difficult, but the consommé must stay clear, so both garnishes are cooked apart and added only at the end.
- The hinge: keep the consommé clearEverything hangs on adding the garnishes to the tureen rather than boiling them in the soup. Prune syrup and browned leeks stirred into the pot will cloud and sweeten it; the leeks should be glazed dry in their own portion of stock first.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (240 ml) of consommé for reducing down onto the leeks. That is a glazing quantity, not a soup quantity.
- The consommé itselfThe consomme itself -- The recipe assumes you have made one elsewhere in the book. The text gives no quantity; allow roughly 6 cups of well-flavoured, degreased and clarified stock if you are serving six, held at a bare simmer so it does not go cloudy.
- PrunesEighteen prunes for the pot means pitted ones today; period prunes were often sold with stones in. Modern soft-pack prunes need no overnight soak and will collapse in fifteen minutes of boiling, so poach them 5-8 minutes in the sugar, cinnamon and water, then let them sit off the heat.
- "Brown for ten minutes"A teaspoon of butter is barely enough to keep two leeks' worth of julienne from scorching. Use a tablespoon, moderate heat, and aim for pale gold rather than dark brown; burnt leek will carry a bitter edge straight into a delicate broth.
- The garbled lineThe text says to add leeks after the leeks are already in the pan. Read it as: reduce the cup of consommé onto the leeks until nearly dry, tip that into the tureen, add the drained prunes, then pour the hot consommé over.
- SweetnessAn ounce of sugar (about 2 tablespoons) plus the prunes makes this markedly sweet against a savoury broth. Reduce the sugar or drain the prunes thoroughly if you want the balance closer to modern taste.
- YieldEighteen prunes suggests six as a first course, three prunes and a small tangle of leeks to each bowl, though the recipe gives no yield. Warm the tureen and the plates; a clear soup loses heat very quickly.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) works through the classical repertoire of garnished consommés, where the name signals the garnish rather than the stock. "Portugaise" in French kitchen shorthand more often meant tomato, so the prune-and-leek pairing here is a departure, and it sits closer to the northern European tradition of cooking prunes with leeks in broth, of which Scottish cock-a-leekie is the best-known survivor. Dried fruit in savoury soup was not unusual in this period: prunes were a cheap, keeping ingredient. The method follows restaurant practice, with each element cooked in its own pan and assembled in the tureen at the last moment so that the clarity of the consommé, the point of the whole exercise, survives to the table.