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Sago, Turinoise
Prepare and strain a consomme into another pan. Sprinkle in three ounces well-cleaned sago, mix well and let slowly boil for thirty minutes. Scald for five minutes twelve sound, large Italian chestnuts, drain on a sieve, and neatly peel them; plunge them in a half pint boiling white broth for thirty-five minutes; lift up with a skimmer and add to the soup. Pour in a gill of cream, mix well with a wooden spoon, boil for five minutes, pour into a tureen and serve with a little Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear soup thickened with sago and garnished with whole chestnuts, in the French service style where the name signals the garnish rather than the base. The original assumes a stockpot already going and gives no quantity for the consommé.
- Quantities the recipe omitsThree ounces of sago and twelve chestnuts suit roughly two quarts of consommé, serving six to eight. Less liquid than that and the sago will set the soup into a paste.
- A gillHalf a cup. Add the cream off a hard boil and let it come back gently; a violent boil after cream is in will curdle a lean stock.
- SagoStarch pearls from the pith of tropical palms, sold in Asian and South Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca behaves almost identically. Rinse well, and stir now and then during the thirty minutes, as sago sinks and scorches on the pan bottom.
- Thirty minutes of simmeringSago is done when the pearls are translucent with no white core, which can happen sooner than half an hour with modern fine pearl. Judge by appearance rather than the clock; overcooked, it dissolves and clouds the consommé.
- "White broth"A pale stock of veal or chicken, not browned. Plain chicken stock is a fair substitute for poaching the chestnuts.
- The chestnutsThe scald is only to loosen the shells; score each nut across the flat side first, and peel while hot, since both shell and inner skin cling once cooled. Thirty-five minutes in broth is for raw chestnuts. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, the practical modern option, need five to ten minutes only, and will break up if left longer.
- Keeping the soup clearStrain the chestnut broth rather than tipping it in, and lift the nuts out with a skimmer as directed. Chestnut starch and sago starch together will turn the consommé opaque if you are careless.
- The ParmesanServed separately, grated, at the table. Stirring it into the pot will pull the soup cloudy and stringy.
"Turinoise" is kitchen French for Turin-style, and in the classical repertoire it often signals chestnuts, though Turin-style garnishes are not confined to them: Piedmont, with Turin at its centre, is one of Europe's great chestnut regions, and the marron there was a staple food long before it became a luxury confection. The recipe belongs to the era when a restaurant's soup list was built largely by taking one clear consomme and renaming it according to whatever was dropped into the tureen, a practice set out at length in the French professional manuals of the early twentieth century. Sago, imported from Southeast Asian palms through the colonial trade, was a common European soup thickener in the nineteenth century, giving body without the floury taste of a roux; it has since been largely displaced in Western kitchens by tapioca, which comes from cassava and is easier to source.