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Clam and Tomato Consommé
To four cups of Consommé add two cups each clam water and tomato pulp. Clear, and add soft part of clams. Heat to boiling point and serve in Bouillon cups.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already have a clarified consommé on the stove and a pot of clams opening beside it. The hinge is the clearing step, which comes before the clam meat goes in, not after.
- Clear, then add the clamsRaft the soup with beaten egg white (one white per quart, plus a little cold stock), bring it up slowly without stirring once it sets, and strain through a doubled cloth. Only then drop in the soft parts of the clams and bring back to the boil. Clams added before clarification will cloud it again and shred in the straining.
- Clam waterThe liquor from clams steamed in a little water, decanted carefully off the sand at the bottom; bottled clam broth was also on sale in this period, though the book does not say which is intended. Two cups will take several pounds of hard-shell clams in the shell. Strain it through cloth even if it looks clean.
- Tomato pulpIn 1913 this means fresh ripe tomatoes cut up, cooked briefly and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed and not tomato purée or paste. Canned whole tomatoes sieved the same way are the closest match; commercial purée is far too concentrated and will make the soup heavy.
- SaltClam liquor carries a great deal of salt of its own. Season only after the tomato and clam water have gone into the consommé, or the finished soup will be flat-out briny.
- Soft part of the clamsThe belly and body, with the tough neck and siphon skin discarded. Two minutes at a bare boil is enough; clams held at a simmer turn to rubber quickly, and this soup is meant to be assembled and served.
- Bouillon cupsTwo-handled cups of about six ounces, drunk rather than spooned. The recipe makes eight cups of soup, so roughly ten servings at that size, fewer in ordinary soup bowls.
- If the tomato dulls the colourA well-cleared consommé with tomato in it should be a clear amber-red. Cloudiness usually means the tomato pulp went in unstrained or the raft was disturbed; both are fixed by passing the whole thing through a fresh cloth before the clams go in.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the wave of American menu books published in the years before the First World War, in which each week of the year gets a full meal planned out and the cook is expected to work through the calendar. The old rule about shellfish in months with an R -- folk tradition rather than documented practice -- put clams and oysters at their best from September onward, and coastal markets in the Northeast were full of them by autumn. Clam broth itself was something of a health drink in this period, sold hot at soda fountains and in hotel lobbies as a restorative.