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Consommé with Barley
2 quarts consommé. 2 tablespoons pearl barley. 2 quarts boiling water.
Salt.
Chives or Parsley.
PROCESS: Soak barley in cold water over night; drain and cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain and reheat in consommé. Sprinkle in one-half tablespoon finely chopped chives or parsley. Serve with crisp crackers.
A garnished clear soup that depends entirely on the quality of the consommé; the barley is cooked separately so it never clouds the broth.
- The hinge: cook the barley apartBarley sheds starch as it softens, which turns a clear consommé cloudy and slightly gluey. Boil it in the plain salted water, drain it well, then add it to the hot consommé only to warm through.
- Pearl barley todayPearl barley generally cooks in 25-40 minutes without soaking. The overnight soak the recipe calls for still shortens the cooking and gives more evenly tender grains, so it is worth doing if you plan ahead.
- Two tablespoons is not a mistakeIt looks meagre against two quarts of soup, but barley swells three to four times in volume, and this is meant as a garnish suspended in clear broth rather than a thick soup. Adding more will make it a barley soup instead.
- Two quarts of water for two tablespoonsThe cooking water is very generous, which dilutes the released starch and leaves the drained grains cleaner. Salt it as you would pasta water.
- The consomméThe book assumes a homemade clarified stock. Good low-sodium boxed beef or chicken broth works; if it is at all murky, bring it to a bare simmer and strain through a coffee filter or several layers of damp cheesecloth, and taste for salt only after the barley goes in.
- Keep it below a boilOnce the barley is in the consommé, hold the soup just under a simmer. A hard boil agitates the grains and clouds what you took trouble to keep clear.
- Herbs at the last momentHalf a tablespoon of chives or parsley for the whole pot is a scattering on the surface, added at the table or just before it goes out. Chopped early, both go dark and lose their point.
- YieldTwo quarts would serve about eight as a first course in shallow soup plates, though the recipe gives no yield. The 'crisp crackers' of the original are unspecified; oyster crackers or a plain water biscuit are in keeping.
Clear soups sat at the head of the formal American dinner from the 1880s through the First World War, and cookbooks of the period list dozens of consommés distinguished only by their garnish -- consommé with barley, with royale custard, with vermicelli, with tapioca, with printanier vegetables. The convention came from French service, where the name of the garnish stood in for the name of the soup, and it suited a book like this one, organised as fifty-two complete Sunday menus: one well-made stockpot could open a dozen different dinners depending on what was dropped into it. Barley itself is one of the oldest cultivated grains and had long been considered restorative -- barley water was standard invalid fare in nineteenth-century households -- which gave a soup like this a reputation for being nourishing as well as elegant. Pearl barley, the grain abraded until the hull and bran are gone, was the refined form suitable for a clear soup, and the separate cooking called for here is the small piece of technique that keeps the two ideas from spoiling each other.