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Consommé with Egg Balls
To six cups of hot Consommé add egg balls, serving three or four in each portion. 1 hard cooked egg. 1/8 teaspoon salt.
Few grains pepper.
This is a garnish rather than a dish in itself, and the printed text is compressed to the point of leaving out a step or two. Here is what it assumes you already know.
- What an egg ball isSieved hard-cooked yolk, seasoned, bound to a stiff paste and rolled into pea-sized balls, then poached briefly in simmering water or stock before going into the soup. Many versions omit the white or use only part of it, since it is the yolk that binds.
- The missing binderAs printed, a hard-cooked egg with salt and pepper will not hold together. Period versions of the same garnish bind the sieved yolk with a little raw yolk, sometimes with a pinch of flour. Cooked in simmering liquid, the raw yolk sets and the balls firm up.
- Quantities do not matchOne egg yields perhaps eight to twelve small balls; three or four per portion across six cups of consommé needs roughly two to three eggs. Scale the egg upward and keep the seasoning proportional.
- Size and handlingRoll them no larger than a small marble; larger ones are more likely to break apart when they hit hot liquid. Poach a test ball first; if it disintegrates, work in more yolk.
- Poach separatelyCook the balls in a shallow pan of barely simmering salted water, not in the consommé itself. Anything shed from the surface will cloud a broth that was clarified at some effort.
- ConsomméConsomme -- In 1913 this meant a clarified stock, strained through cloth and served brilliantly clear. A good boxed consomme or a well-strained homemade stock stands in; a cloudy stock defeats the point of the garnish.
- YieldSix cups serves six as a first course, at about eight ounces a head. Add the balls to the plate or cup just before the soup goes to table so they stay whole.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era of the promotional cookbook, issued to sell baking powder and to give the middle-class hostess a year of planned menus, one for each Sunday. Egg balls are a much older garnish than the book, standard in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American cookery for mock turtle soup, where they stood in for the turtle's own eggs; by the time they reached a plain consomme they had become simply a mark of a carefully finished clear soup. The whole logic of the course is display: a broth reduced and clarified until you can read print through it, then given something small and pale to catch the light. That such a garnish could be listed in three lines, with no method at all, says a good deal about what a cook of 1913 was expected to know without being told.