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Consomme, Vert-Pre
Prepare a consomme strain into a saucepan, set on the fire, and as soon as it comes to boiling point dredge in two ounces tapioca. Mix with wooden spoon while adding, let gently boil for fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while, then add two tablespoons each cooked asparagus tips, cooked green peas, twelve string beans cut in short pieces, the leaves from a branch each parsley and chervil. Lightly mix, boil for five minutes, pour consomme into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear soup garnished with spring vegetables and lightly bodied with tapioca. The original assumes you already have consommé on hand and gives no volume, so the proportions need pinning down before you start.
- How much consomméThe recipe gives no volume. Two ounces of tapioca suits roughly 2 quarts of clarified stock, which will serve 6 to 8 as a first course.
- Which tapioca"Dredge in" suggests a fine or small-pearl tapioca rather than large boba pearls. Use quick-cooking or small pearl tapioca; large pearls will still be chalky at the centre after fifteen minutes.
- Dredge, do not dumpSprinkle the tapioca in a thin stream while stirring, exactly as written. Added all at once it clumps into gluey lumps that never disperse, and you cannot fish them out of a clear soup.
- Keep the boil gentleA hard rolling boil clouds a consommé you have gone to trouble to clarify, and it also breaks the tapioca down into starchy haze. Hold it at a bare simmer for the fifteen minutes.
- The vegetables are already cookedAsparagus tips, peas and beans go in only to be heated through and to hold their colour. Five minutes is the maximum; frozen peas need barely two. Cook and refresh them in cold water separately if you are starting from raw.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. If you cannot find it, a little extra parsley with two or three tarragon leaves gives a closer impression than parsley alone. The recipe boils the leaves in for the last five minutes; adding them whole at the very end instead keeps them from turning olive-drab.
- SeasoningNo salt is called for, presumably because the consommé would already have been seasoned in the making. Taste after the tapioca goes in.
Vert-pré — "green meadow" — is one of the standard French garnish names, applied across the classical repertoire to anything dressed in green: a grilled steak with watercress and straw potatoes, a fish with green butter, or here a consommé strewn with the first vegetables of spring. The tapioca is doing a job that has since fallen out of fashion. Cassava starch reached European kitchens from tropical sources and was often said to be valued for thickening without clouding, so a clear soup could be given a little weight on the palate while still reading as a consommé; consommé aux perles and consommé tapioca appear on hotel menus of the period. That a French garnish name and a South American starch sit together in a single line of an American cookbook titled The International Cook Book is a fair summary of how grand-hotel cooking worked around 1900.