Home › The World's Kitchen › Consomme Veneur
Consomme Veneur
Prepare consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Detach all good leaves from a head of fresh green lettuce, thoroughly wash, drain well, slice into julienne strips, place in a sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter and cook for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Add to the consomme with leaves from branch each tarragon and chervil, a royale garnishing, boil for three minutes, pour consomme into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a whole one: it assumes you already have a clarified consommé and a tray of royale in the larder, and it tells you only how to garnish them. Everything hinges on the clarity of the broth, so the additions go in at the last minute and barely cook.
- The consommé itselfThe consomme itself -- The book takes for granted a properly clarified beef or chicken consomme, raft-cleared with lean minced meat and egg white. The recipe gives no quantities for the broth, so the yield depends entirely on how much consomme has been prepared.
- Royale garnishingA royale is a firm unsweetened custard — conventionally something like 1 egg plus 1 extra yolk to 1/2 cup of consomme or cream — baked gently in a shallow buttered mould set in a water bath until just set, chilled, then turned out and cut into small dice or shapes. The book gives no method or oven temperature for it. It is added only to warm through; boiling breaks it.
- SautoireA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide pan works; the point is surface area so the lettuce sweats rather than stews.
- Ten minutes for lettuceTen minutes in butter is longer than modern taste wants for shredded lettuce. Four or five minutes over low heat, covered, gives tender strips that still taste green. Salt lightly at this stage, since consommé is usually seasoned already.
- Julienne, meaning chiffonadeStack the washed leaves, roll them into a cigar and slice crosswise into fine ribbons. Dry the leaves properly first or the butter will spit and the lettuce will boil.
- The herbs"Leaves from branch each tarragon and chervil" means the picked leaves of one sprig of each — a scant teaspoon or so of each, whole, not chopped. Chervil is fragile and fades within minutes, so add it with the pan off the direct heat.
- The three-minute boilTreat it as a bare simmer. A rolling boil clouds a clarified consommé by agitating fat and fine particles back into suspension, which undoes the work of clarifying it in the first place.
- ServingWarm the tureen and the bowls; a thin clear soup loses heat fast. Serve immediately, as the lettuce continues to soften in the hot broth.
Veneur is French for huntsman — the grand veneur was the master of the royal hunt — and the name attaches to a family of preparations, most famously sauce grand veneur, a peppery poivrade enriched with redcurrant and sometimes game blood. Applied to a consomme the label is looser, and in the classical repertoire that Escoffier codified around the turn of the twentieth century a great many named consommes differ only in their garnish: the same clear broth, dressed with a different combination of vegetables cut fine, herbs, and a royale custard. The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, reproduces dozens of these in the same clipped shorthand, written for a kitchen where stock and royale were standing preparations and the cook needed only to be told which garnish went into which bowl. What survives here is less a recipe than an index entry from a professional system.