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Consomme, Villageoise
Prepare and strain a consomme and keep hot. Cut with a half-inch vegetable cutter two carrots and two turnips. Finely slice the white parts of two leeks and two small white onions and cut half a very small white cabbage into half-inch squares. Place all these vegetables in a small saucepan with a half ounce butter, one gill of the strained consomme, half teaspoon each salt and sugar. Mix well, cover the pan, set in the oven for fifty-five minutes, remove, add the contents of the pan to the consomme, boil for five minutes, pour into a tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup: the vegetables are braised separately in a little of the broth so they hold their shape and their sweetness, then returned to the pot at the last minute. The whole point is clarity, so nothing should be stirred hard or boiled long once the two are joined.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. That is all the liquid the vegetables get, so the pan must be tightly covered or it will run dry before the hour is up.
- How much consommeThe recipe assumes a stockpot already going and gives no volume. A garnish of this size would suit something on the order of 2 quarts of finished consomme, but the figure is a guess; scale it to what you have.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Moderate, 325-350F, is right for a covered braise of this kind.
- The vegetable cutterA half-inch column cutter or the small end of a melon baller, used to cut cylinders or balls from peeled carrot and turnip. A knife-cut half-inch dice does the same work and wastes far less.
- Fifty-five minutesLong by current practice, and turnip and cabbage in particular will collapse. Check at 30 minutes; the pieces should be tender but still distinct, since anything mushy will cloud the finished bowl.
- LeeksSplit the white parts lengthwise and wash between the layers before slicing. Grit released into the pan ends up in a soup whose only virtue is transparency.
- The final five minutesAdd the vegetables and their scant syrupy liquid to the hot consomme and bring it barely to a boil, no more. A rolling boil at this stage lifts sediment and undoes the straining.
- Salt and sugarHalf a teaspoon of each seasons the vegetables alone, not the whole pot. Taste the consomme separately after the two are combined.
Villageoise means simply "of the village" or peasant-style, and in the classical French repertoire the name signals a garnish of humble root and leaf vegetables rather than anything grand: carrot, turnip, leek, onion, cabbage. The nineteenth-century codification of consommes ran to dozens of such named garnishes, each a fixed formula so that a kitchen brigade or a hotel menu could call for one word and get a predictable bowl. The convention of cooking the garnish apart in a little of the broth, called etuver, is covered cooking in a small amount of liquid, used both to concentrate flavour and to help protect the consomme's clarity, which was the measure of a kitchen's competence; a cloudy consomme was a public failure. That such formulas were reproduced intact in English-language cookbooks aimed at ambitious home cooks shows how completely the French professional vocabulary had been absorbed.