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Consomme, Suedois
Prepare a consomme, strain it into another saucepan and keep simmering. Cut in exceedingly small square pieces a medium carrot, one turnip, one onion, one leek and a quarter small sound cabbage; place them in a saucepan with half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; pour in enough of the consomme to cover the vegetables, cover pan and set in oven for forty-five minutes. Remove, add one egg yolk, a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese and sharply mix with a wooden spoon.
Cut out from a loaf of stale French bread twelve thin slices, toast them to a light colour, then spread the vegetables over, arrange on a tin, set in oven with door open for ten minutes, place in a soup tureen, pour consomme over and serve.
A garnished clear soup: the consomme is the base, and the work is in the vegetable spread and the toasts that carry it. Nothing here is difficult, but the sequence matters.
- The hingeThe egg yolk and cheese go in off the heat, and the vegetables must be stirred hard enough to bind them into a thick paste rather than a wet mince. If the mixture is loose it will slide off the toast and cloud the consomme in the tureen.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is roughly half a teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the forty-five minute braise, and the recipe offers no oven term to translate. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, would suit; the vegetables should be tender and most of the liquid absorbed, not browned.
- Cut size"Exceedingly small square pieces" means a brunoise, about an eighth of an inch. Uniform dice matter more than usual because the spread has to sit on a thin slice of toast.
- The second trip to the ovenTen minutes with the door open is a low, dry heat meant to set the surface of the spread and keep the toast crisp; between this and the hot consomme the yolk should be cooked. A low oven, or a broiler watched closely, does the same job.
- The breadStale French bread is called for, presumably because fresh crumb collapses under the wet spread. Cut the twelve slices thin and toast them only to pale gold, as the recipe says, since they will go back into the oven and then into hot broth.
- Consomme qualityEverything depends on a genuinely clear, well-seasoned broth. A cloudy stock will look worse, not better, once the garnished toasts are floated in it.
- Yield and serviceTwelve slices suggests six servings at two apiece. Assemble at the last moment and pour the consomme over in the tureen at the table, or the toasts turn to porridge.
The name is French kitchen shorthand rather than Swedish cooking: nineteenth-century professional menus attached national adjectives to clear soups to distinguish one garnish from another, and suedois may have been meant to suggest the northern European vegetables in play here, cabbage, turnip and leek, though no fixed convention of that kind is established. The structure is older than the label, though. Bread laid in the bottom of the bowl and broth poured over it is the ancestral form of soup across Europe, preserved in the French word soupe, which originally meant the sopped slice and only later the liquid. What this version adds is the restaurant refinement of the period: a labour-intensive brunoise, an egg yolk and Parmesan binding, and a clear consomme kept scrupulously separate from the garnish until the moment of service, so that a peasant technique arrives at the table looking like hotel cooking.