Consommé à la Bourbon (Bourbon-Style Consommé)

Source: Auguste Escoffier, 1907

History

Consommé à la Bourbon is one of the named garnished consommés set down by Georges Auguste Escoffier in Le Guide Culinaire, his 1903 French restaurant-cuisine reference. In Escoffier's own formula it is a double chicken consommé (consommé de volaille double) lightly bound with tapioca. The garnish is very small medallions of chicken forcemeat poached in little buttered oval tartlet molds, each decorated on the bottom with a fleur-de-lis of truffle — Escoffier notes that petits-fours molds shaped like a fleur-de-lis work well for this — finished with pearl tapioca (perles du Japon) and chervil leaves (pluches de cerfeuil).

The dish's name and its signature garnish follow Escoffier's classical naming practice: the fleur-de-lis is the heraldic emblem historically associated with the French monarchy and the House of Bourbon, which the truffle fleur-de-lis worked into each forcemeat medallion visually echoes. That is the extent of the "Bourbon" reference — a decorative and onomastic allusion in Escoffier's book.

Beyond this, the historical record does not document who created the dish, who ate it, or that it carried any social or class significance. It survives essentially as a formula and a name in Escoffier's Guide.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Prepare a double chicken consommé (consommé de volaille double) and lightly bind it with tapioca.
  2. For the garnish: Form tiny medallions from chicken forcemeat (farce volaille). Poach them in small buttered oval tartlet molds—Escoffier notes that small four (small pastry) molds shaped like a fleur-de-lis work well for this purpose. Decorate the bottom of each mold with a truffle fleur-de-lis before filling.
  3. Finish the consommé with the poached chicken forcemeat medallions, Japanese pearl tapioca (perles du Japon), and chervil leaves (pluches de cerfeuil).

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