Home › January › Consommé Duchess (Served with a meringue)
Consommé Duchess (Served with a meringue)
Consommé served with a meringue, prepared as follows: Beat the whites of eggs very stiff and drop by heaping tablespoonsful into milk heated to the scalding point in a shallow vessel (a dripping pan is the best), using care that milk does not scorch. Turn each spoonful, allowing it to cook, until it sets. Place one of these individual meringues on the top of each service of consommé, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. Serve with Imperial Sticks.
This is a garnish rather than a soup recipe: the consommé itself is assumed, and what the entry teaches is a savory version of the poached meringue better known from œufs à la neige. Two things govern success — the temperature of the milk and the clarity of the broth.
- Scalding point, not simmeringScalded milk is 180–185°F: steam rising, small bubbles at the rim, no rolling motion. Milk at a true simmer will tear the meringues apart and toughen them; milk well below scalding will set them slowly, if at all.
- A dripping pan means a shallow roasting panThe point is depth, not shape. Use any wide pan that holds an inch or so of milk so the spoonfuls float clear of the bottom and can be turned without crowding.
- TimingAbout one minute per side is enough for a heaping tablespoon of whites. They are done when the surface is matte and the meringue holds its shape on the spoon. Overcooked whites weep and collapse into the soup.
- Whipping the whitesBeat to stiff but not dry peaks, with a pinch of salt. Whites beaten past the point of gloss break down in the milk. Use them within a few minutes of beating.
- Lifting and drainingRemove with a slotted spoon and rest briefly on a clean towel. Milk carried over into a clear consommé will cloud it, which defeats the entire purpose of a consommé.
- The consomméThis assumes a clarified beef or veal broth, served very hot. A cloudy stock will look wrong under a white meringue; if you are not clarifying with egg white and lean mince, at least strain through a cloth.
- Imperial SticksApparently a thin, crisp bread or cheese stick served alongside soup, in the same family as a cheese straw or grissini. Any slender crisp bread stick fills the role.
- YieldTwo egg whites make roughly six to eight meringues, one per serving. Poach them just before serving; they soften and deflate on standing.
Consommé à la duchesse belongs to the long list of French garnish names of the classic repertoire, which often told a cook less about what was in the soup than about what was served in or on it. The floating meringue is a savory borrowing of the dessert technique of œufs à la neige, whites poached in milk. Books like this one were written for the middle-class household running a formal multi-course dinner without a professional kitchen: the consommé is taken for granted, the fussy touch that makes it a named dish gets the paragraph, and the parsley on top does the work of a chef's garnish at almost no cost.