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Consomme Rouennaise
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Cut two each carrots and turnips into half-inch-long and one-third-inch-thick strips and with point of a small knife round them into olive forms. Place in a small saucepan with half ounce butter, half teaspoon each salt and sugar and two gills consomme. Lightly mix, cover pan, boil for five minutes, set in oven for forty-five minutes, remove and add to consomme. Peel twelve exceedingly small white onions and place in a sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter. Sprinkle a tablespoon sugar over and let gently brown for twenty-five minutes, being careful to toss frequently meanwhile. Lift up and add to consomme, boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear soup whose whole character rests on the garnish: tourné root vegetables braised in stock and small onions glazed to a deep brown. The original assumes you already have a finished consommé on the stove.
- The consommé itselfThe recipe takes the base for granted. Use a well-clarified beef or chicken consommé, about 2 quarts, kept at a bare simmer so it stays crystal clear; a rolling boil will cloud what you clarified.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of consommé for braising the carrots and turnips.
- "Round them into olive forms"This is the tourné cut: seven flat faces pared with a small knife into a barrel or olive shape. It is decorative rather than functional, but uniform pieces do cook evenly, and in a clear soup irregular chunks look like an accident.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Forty-five minutes of covered braising for small vegetable pieces points to a moderate oven, 325-350F. Check at 25 minutes; modern carrots and turnips are usually tender well before three quarters of an hour, and the liquid should reduce to a glaze rather than dry out and scorch.
- SautoireA shallow, straight-sided sauté pan. Any wide heavy skillet works, so long as the twelve onions sit in one layer with room to roll when you toss them.
- Glazing the onionsA tablespoon of sugar over twelve onions in butter, browned twenty-five minutes over gentle heat, is a caramel glaze. Low heat and frequent tossing are the point; hurried, the sugar burns bitter and the onions stay raw at the centre. Peel them but leave the root end intact so they hold together.
- The final boilFive minutes at a boil once the garnish is in is enough to marry things. Longer and the glaze bleeds off the onions and dulls the clarity of the broth.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity of consomme. On an assumed two quarts it would serve six to eight as a first course; the twelve onions work out to one or two a bowl, and the turned carrot and turnip will give rather more pieces than that.
Nineteenth-century French kitchens catalogued clear soups by garnish, and the name was often meant to do the work of a description. The suffix simply means "in the style of Rouen," the Norman city better known in cookery for its ducks, though regional soup names of this period were often loose homages rather than strict local traditions. Books of the sort this recipe comes from were written for professional and ambitious household cooks in the era when a formal dinner opened with soup, and the labour here is entirely in the presentation: turning carrots and turnips into miniature olives and browning onions to a even gloss are hotel-kitchen tasks, the kind of work that justified a large brigade. The technique of glazing small onions in butter and sugar remains standard, and survives in garnishes such as those for bourguignon.