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Consommé with Rice Balls
To six cups of hot Consommé, (for recipe see Page 149), add Rice Balls. 1 cup cold, cooked rice. 2 tablespoons flour. 1 teaspoon grated onion.
This is a garnish note rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you have already made the consommé on its page 149, and it gives the rice-ball ingredients as a short list with no method. Fill in the gaps as follows.
- The list is incomplete as printedA cup of cold rice, two tablespoons of flour and a teaspoon of grated onion give you no obvious binder. Comparable rice-ball garnishes are usually bound with a beaten egg (sometimes only the yolk) and seasoned with salt and pepper; without something of that kind the mixture is likely to break up in liquid.
- Cold rice is the pointFreshly cooked rice is too wet and too soft to hold a shape. Use rice cooked the day before and refrigerated, drained of any free moisture, so the starch has set.
- Size them smallMarble-sized, about half an inch, so that several sit in a cupful without crowding the bowl. Roll with damp hands and rest them on a floured plate for a few minutes before cooking.
- Cook them separatelyDo not simmer the balls in the consommé itself. Loose starch and flour will cloud a clear soup, which defeats the entire purpose of a consommé. Poach them in lightly salted water or a little spare stock for three to four minutes, lift out with a slotted spoon, and drop them into the hot soup at the table.
- Or fry themThe balls can also be fried in deep fat until pale gold and floated on the soup as a crisp garnish. The book gives no method, so either treatment is open to you; frying gives a firmer ball that survives the bowl longer.
- Grated onion, not choppedThe instruction is deliberate. Grating gives juice and a smooth pulp that seasons the mixture evenly, where chopped onion leaves raw crunchy pieces in a delicate garnish.
- Serving the consomméConsommé is poured into shallow bowls or cups, four to six ounces each, so six cups will run to roughly eight to twelve servings. Have the soup at a full steaming heat when it goes into warmed bowls, since a clear soup with no fat on it loses temperature quickly.
Clear soup with a small shaped garnish was often the opening of a formal American Sunday dinner around 1900, and the garnish was how a cook signaled effort: quenelles, custard cut in diamonds, tiny profiteroles, or, at the thrifty end, balls made from yesterday's rice. Consommé itself is French in name and technique — stock clarified with egg white and lean meat until it runs bright — and its arrival in the ordinary middle-class American dinner is part of the same late-Victorian enthusiasm for French service that gave household books their long lists of soup garnishes. The rice balls use cold cooked rice from an earlier meal rather than anything made specially. The cross-reference to a base recipe elsewhere in the volume was the usual economy of these menu books.