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Consomme a LA Celestine

A clear consommé garnished with thin pancakes made from flour, butter, cheese, parsley, egg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Consomme a LA Celestine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the garnish

  1. Make the garnish by mixing flour, melted butter, grated cheese, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, egg, and milk into a batter.

  2. Fry the batter in very thin pancakes until golden, then drain and cut into strips.

Serve

  1. Bring the clear stock to a boil and add the garnish strips.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the thin pancakes so they hold their shape.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together when fried.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and a little richness to the pancake garnish.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the pancakes brown and turn golden.

The step that matters

Frying the thin pancakes. The batter must be spread very thin and fried until golden. Too thick or too hot and the pancakes scorch outside while staying raw inside, or they become tough and hard to cut into clean strips.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, cheese, pepper, egg, milk):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, cheese, pepper, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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