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Consommé Au Riz
8 cups consommé. 1/4 cup washed rice. 6 cups cold water. 1/2 tablespoon salt.
PROCESS: Add salt to boiling water, then add rice slowly and let cook until rice is soft; drain. Pour over rice six cups cold water to separate kernels. Add rice to hot consommé and serve with Cheese Balls.
A garnished clear soup: the rice is boiled apart from the broth so the consommé stays transparent. That separation is the whole point of the method.
- Cook the rice separately, alwaysRice boiled directly in consommé releases starch and clouds it, undoing the labour of clarifying. Boil it in plain salted water, drain, rinse, and add it to the hot broth only at the moment of serving.
- The water quantitiesThe 6 cups of cold water are the rinse, poured over the drained rice to wash off surface starch and separate the grains. The recipe never states how much water to boil the rice in; use a generous pot of it, as for pasta, and drain when tender.
- Rice to chooseA long-grain white rice holds its shape best in hot liquid. Short-grain sheds more starch and can haze the soup; parboiled will stay firmer, which some cooks prefer and others find too firm.
- Quarter cup is correctIt looks miserly, but 1/4 cup dry rice swells to roughly 3/4 cup cooked, which is the right proportion for 8 cups of broth. Consommé au riz is a garnished clear soup, not a rice soup.
- TimingRice sitting in hot consommé keeps absorbing liquid and softening. Combine at the last minute and do not hold the finished soup; if the rice must wait, keep it drained and covered and warm it through in the broth as you ladle.
- ConsomméThe recipe assumes a consommé made from scratch, presumably given elsewhere in the book; it does not specify beef or chicken. A good low-sodium broth will stand in, but taste before adding further salt.
- Cheese BallsA separate recipe referred to by name only; presumably given elsewhere in the book. Any small crisp cheese fritter, straw or gougère serves the same purpose.
- YieldEight cups of soup serves six to eight as a first course.
Consommé au riz is one of the standard garnished clear soups of the classical French repertoire, where the pattern is fixed: a long-simmered stock clarified with lean meat and egg white, then named for whatever is dropped into it at the end — au riz for rice, vermicelli, julienne, royale. A light clear soup at the head of the meal was a familiar mark of French-influenced service in American cookbooks of the period. The practice of boiling the rice apart and rinsing it in cold water serves the clarity of the finished soup, which cooking the rice in the consommé itself would spoil.