It is usually made in hotels and restaurants, to demonstrate the skill of the cook in making a dish that betrays no trace of the food that was used to make it.
You will sometimes see statements such as: “You really can’t call yourself a cook unless you can make a first class consomme.”
Disregard first of all how unfortunate it is that someone trying to be so snobby should not know that there is an accent at the end of the word consommé . After all, it’s half-educated pompousness like that which gives birth to such pronouncements. There are many types of cooking around the world, and even within the Western world, where Consommé just has no role to play.
Beyond that, Consommé is an artifice, born of pre-revolutionary French kitchens that gaily squandered food while the starving masses huddled outside the gates. I object strongly to a dish which discards the actual food used to make it, but for Pete’s sake, if you’re going to climb up on a pedestal and go on about it, spell it right.
Substitutes
Broth, stock.