Consommé Bouquetiere

Consommé Bouquetière (clarified chicken broth with a flower-garden garnish) teaches the discipline of separate cooking. The one true thing to know before touching a pan is that the vegetables do not go into it together. Each must taste of itself and meet the tureen tender, bright, and intact.

The original kitchen assumed finished chicken consommé from a stockpot never off the fire, a saucier tending the tapioca, and several hands working over several pans. At home, begin with prepared consommé, use one saucepan in sequence, replace the tubular cutter with a small melon baller or a patient knife, and replace fine linen with damp butter muslin. Those extra hands and pans are scaffolding and can go. Cooking each vegetable according to its nature and straining away the tapioca are the dish, and they stay. The entry's quart becomes a two-quart home batch here; the tapioca doubles exactly, preserving its ratio while leaving enough soup for a dinner table. One cook, one stove, one evening.

When it is right, the consommé is amber-gold and brilliantly transparent, with the faintest silk on the lips and five clear tastes in every ladle. The step that decides it is the straining: poach the tapioca at a bare tremble, then let the broth pass through the cloth without pressure.