Consommé aux Profiterolles

Consommé aux Profiterolles (clear chicken consommé with tiny savory choux) teaches one true thing: components that depend on contrast must remain apart until the last possible moment. The broth should be perfectly clear and deeply flavored, the profiterolles dry enough to feel almost weightless. Bring them together too soon and the dish loses its reason for being.

The source assumed the brigade's stockpot never left the fire, a pastry station produced trays of choux, and a saucier, the sauce cook, kept service moving. At home, you begin with a finished two-quart batch of excellent chicken consommé and forty Profiterolles for Soups (No. 218), refreshing the shells in an ordinary oven only if storage has softened them. No salamander enters this preparation; the moderate, even oven heat named by the source is exactly right. Perpetual hot holding and brigade quantities are scaffolding, so they go. Clear broth, very dry shells, and last-second service are the dish, so they stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

When it is right, the amber broth gleams around forty pale-gold shells, and the first spoonful meets a crisp crust before the consommé reaches it. Test the dryness before anyone sits down. If a cooled shell dents instead of holding firm, return the batch to the low oven and cool it again. Ça se rattrape.