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Consomme Prentanier
Prepare a consomme but strain it into another saucepan instead of the six cups.
This is a one-line variation that leans entirely on the consommé recipe printed above it in the book, and it stops before saying what makes the soup printanier. A few things need filling in before it will work as written.
- The title is a misprint"Prentanier" should read printanier, French for "spring-like." The name signals a clear consommé garnished with small spring vegetables, so the recipe is incomplete as printed.
- "Instead of the six cups"The base recipe printed above evidently ended by straining the consomm he six individving cups for serving, though the phrase could also refer to a measure of liquid; here the soup goes into a clean saucepan instead, presumably because it still has to be garnished.
- What to addA printanier garnish is traditionally carrots and turnips cut into small dice or pea-sized balls, plus green peas and fine-cut green beans, each cooked separately in salted water until just tender and added to the hot consommé at the last moment. Cooking them in the consommé itself clouds it.
- Keep it clearThe whole point of a consommé is transparency. Strain through a sieve lined with several layers of damp cheesecloth, do not press or stir the raft if the base was clarified with egg white, and skim every trace of fat from the surface with paper towels.
- Reheat, do not boilOnce garnished, bring the soup only to a bare simmer. A rolling boil will break up the vegetables and put fine particles back into suspension.
- SeasoningCorrect the seasoning at the end rather than earlier, since reduction concentrates the salt. Taste and adjust with salt, and with a little more sherry or Madeira if the base recipe called for it.
- YieldSix cups, following the base recipe; six first-course servings.
Consommé printanier belongs to the long catalogue of clear-soup variations codified in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, where a single well-made consommé served as the base for dozens of named soups distinguished only by their garnish: brunoise for finely diced vegetables, julienne for matchsticks, royale for a savory custard cut into shapes, printanier for the young vegetables of spring. American and English cookbooks of the early twentieth century reproduced these lists wholesale, often as terse cross-references of exactly this kind, on the assumption that the reader had already mastered the mother recipe. The brevity is a period habit rather than an oversight, though it makes such entries nearly useless on their own. The soup's prestige rested on its clarity, which took hours of gentle simmering and careful clarification with egg white and lean minced beef, and clear soup accordingly opened formal dinners as a demonstration that the kitchen had time and skill to spare.