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Consomme, Printemps
Prepare and strain a consomme into another saucepan and keep simmering. Cut tender parts of a very small bunch green asparagus in half-inch pieces, boil in a pint water with teaspoon salt twenty-five minutes, drain and add to the consomme; add also three tablespoons cooked green peas, three tablespoons cooked string beans, cut in half-inch pieces, leaves from a branches chervil and leaves from a branch parsley and half teaspoon sugar; boil five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnish soup rather than a soup proper: the whole point is a clear, well-seasoned consommé carrying a few spring vegetables. The book assumes you have already made and clarified the consommé elsewhere.
- The consommé is the recipeNothing here builds flavour except the broth, so use a genuinely strong, clarified stock — a good beef or chicken consommé, or a quality low-sodium stock reduced and seasoned until it tastes finished on its own. A weak base gives you vegetables floating in hot water.
- Keep it clearStraining into a second pan and holding it at a bare simmer is deliberate: a rolling boil clouds a clarified consommé. Cook the vegetables in separate water, drain them, and add them to the broth only at the end.
- Twenty-five minutes of asparagusFar longer than needed for the tender tips of a very small bunch the recipe calls for; the result would be quite soft. Half-inch pieces of thin green asparagus need about 3 to 5 minutes in salted water; drain and, if you want them to stay bright, refresh in cold water.
- "A branches chervil"A typesetting slip for a branch or sprig. Strip the leaves from one sprig each of chervil and parsley and add them whole at the very end — chervil loses its faint anise scent within a minute or two of heat. Chervil is scarce in supermarkets; tarragon in a much smaller quantity, or simply more parsley, is the usual substitute.
- Peas and beansThree tablespoons of each, already cooked, means leftovers or a quick separate blanch. Frozen peas need only to be warmed through in the broth; string beans cut to half-inch lengths take about 4 minutes in boiling salted water.
- The half teaspoon of sugarNot sweetening — it lifts the vegetables and offsets the salt in a reduced broth. With modern sweet frozen peas it can be left out entirely.
- Final boilFive minutes at a boil will dull the colours and soften the asparagus further. A minute at a simmer is enough to bring everything to temperature; check the salt just before it goes into the tureen.
- YieldThe recipe never says how much consomme to start with; this quantity of garnish suits a modest tureen, four or so servings as a first course. Portion so each bowl gets a share of all three vegetables.
Printemps is simply French for spring, and in classical kitchen shorthand a consommé is one garnished with young spring vegetables — traditionally cut small and neatly, sometimes turned into tiny barrel shapes for grander service. The pattern belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of named clear soups, in which one carefully clarified stock is sent out under a variety of different names depending only on what is dropped into it at the last moment: royale for custard dice, brunoise for finely diced root vegetables, printemps for peas, beans and asparagus tips. Books like this one reproduced those names because a menu written in French was the mark of a formal table. The chervil is the period detail: a herb common in French cooking and almost absent from American shops now.