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Potage, Baraguine
Prepare a consomme, strain it into another saucepan, dredge in three ounces of sago, mix well while adding and let boil for fifteen minutes. Cut two ounces smoked beef tongue and one ounce cooked ham in small julienne strips and add to the soup with two tablespoons sherry. Mix well and cook for five minutes, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A classical garnished consommé: the recipe assumes you already have good clear stock and treats the rest as assembly. Two details need attention — the missing quantity of consommé and the behaviour of sago.
- How much consomméThe original never says. Three ounces of sago would give roughly two quarts (2 litres) a light body, which would serve six to eight as a first course; with much less liquid the soup will thicken considerably.
- SagoPearl sago from palm starch, sold in Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically. Rinse it, then rain it into the hot consommé while stirring or it will clump and sink in a mass. The recipe says to boil it for fifteen minutes; a gentle simmer for that time will do the same work, and the pearls should turn from opaque white to clear with no chalky centre.
- Keep it below a rolling boilThe original says to boil, but hard boiling clouds a consommé you have taken trouble to clarify and breaks up the sago pearls; a lazy simmer is the safer reading.
- Smoked beef tongueSold in delicatessens and some butchers, already cooked and pressed; ask for it sliced thick so you can cut julienne. Pastrami-style cured beef is the nearest common substitute, though it is more assertively spiced.
- JulienneMatchsticks about an inch long and no thicker than a coin's edge. Two ounces tongue and one ounce ham is deliberately restrained garnish, not a meat soup — the strips should float in suspension, not settle in a heap.
- The sherryThe recipe says only 'sherry'; a dry one is the usual choice here, and it goes in at the end with just five minutes' cooking. Cream sherry will make the soup taste sweet against the smoked meat.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified because the consommé was assumed to be seasoned already. Taste after the tongue and ham have given up their cure — the garnish carries considerable salt of its own.
Nineteenth-century French kitchen practice named consommés by their garnish rather than their base, so a printed menu of the period reads as a long list of proper nouns — Célestine, Brunoise, Royale — each one a code for what floats in the bowl. "Baraguine" is one of the obscurer entries and its origin is not established. The sago is the period marker. Imported palm starch from Southeast Asia was cheap by 1900, and it gave a clear soup body and visual interest without the cloudiness of a flour thickening; cookbooks of this generation use it in consommés, puddings and invalid cookery alike. Its near-total disappearance from Western kitchens, tapioca aside, is why the recipe now reads more foreign than it did to its first readers.