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Consomme
Consomme is the term applied to the clarified liquor in which meat or poultry or both have been boiled, but it is applied generally to any strong clear gravy soup. The following is a good recipe for its preparation. Wipe but do not wash two pounds of lean beef. Cut it into small slices, and fry them to a brown colour. Then divide the slices into small pieces, and put them, along with a chicken (also cleaned and cut into small pieces) into a saucepan, along with a quarter of a pound of lean ham and three quarts of cold water. Let it slowly reach boiling point, and simmer gently for six hours. When it has been cooking three hours, fry a carrot, turnip, and onion, all minced, together in a little butter until they are brown, and put them with three cloves, a table-spoonful of mixed sweet herbs, three peppercorns, and a table-spoonful of chopped celery into the soup. At the end of the six hours, when the meat is in rags, strain the liquid into a china bowl, and set it away to cool until all the fat rises and forms in a cake on the top. It is a good plan to cool it over-night when there is plenty of time. Every particle of fat must be removed, and it is not possible to do this unless the soup is cooled. To clear consomme return it to the fire, and as soon as it becomes liquid break into it two eggs, and stir them in slowly until the soup begins to steam and the albumen of the eggs is coagulated. The coagulum will entangle all the insoluble matter; then strain the liquid through a napkin, salt it, and heat it just to the boiling-point, when it is ready to serve. It should be perfectly clear, and of a golden-brown colour, like sherry. Probable cost, 4s. 6d.
A textbook double consommé: beef, a whole chicken and ham drawn for six hours, then cleared with egg. The technique is unchanged, but a few of the instructions read oddly to a modern cook.
- The hinge: never let the clarification boilOnce the eggs go in, the liquid must climb slowly to a bare steam so the coagulum forms a single raft. A rolling boil shreds it and drives the cloudy matter back into suspension, and no amount of straining will rescue that.
- Egg white, not whole eggsTwo whole eggs will clarify, but the yolks add fat and a faint dullness. Modern practice uses the whites of three or four eggs, whisked to a froth with the crushed shells; some cooks add a little minced lean beef to bulk the raft.
- MeasuresThree quarts is imperial measure, about 3.4 litres or 14 US cups. Cassell's quarter-pound of lean ham is 4 oz. The beef is simply 2 lb of lean beef; the recipe does not name a cut.
- Chicken"A chicken" here probably means a boiling fowl rather than a young roaster: tougher and more gelatinous. The recipe gives no weight. A whole bird plus a few extra wings or a split carcass will give comparable body.
- Mixed sweet herbsA Victorian dried blend, usually thyme, marjoram, savory and parsley. A tablespoon of the dried mixture, or a bundle of the fresh equivalent tied with a bay leaf, does the same work.
- Wipe but do not washSound advice, then and now, and not squeamishness: surface water dilutes the meat and hinders the browning that gives the soup its sherry colour.
- Chilling the fatAn overnight chill in the refrigerator is easier than the china bowl on the larder shelf, and the fat lifts off in one plate. Any that remains will bead on the surface of the finished consomm",
- StrainingThe "napkin" is a double layer of damp muslin or cheesecloth in a sieve. Ladle rather than pour, and do not press the raft.
- Yield and servingSix hours of simmering plus straining will reduce the three quarts appreciably, though by how much depends on the pot and the heat; the recipe gives no yield. Salt only at the end, as the ham and the long reduction do much of the seasoning.
- Probable cost4s. 6d. was a substantial outlay for a single soup.
Consomm" comes from the French past participle of consommer, to consummate or complete, and the word carries the sense of a broth carried as far as it will go: meat drawn until it is "in rags", then stripped of every trace of fat and cloud. It belongs to the professional French kitchen that dominated grand English cookery through the nineteenth century, and the egg clarification was taught as a foundational skill " the same raft technique clears aspic jelly and glaze. The clarity was the whole display, and it is often said that a consomm" "like sherry" advertised both an expensive larder and a cook who could hold a pot below the boil for hours. The body of such a soup came entirely from gelatin drawn out of connective tissue and bone, which is why the recipe insists on lean beef and a whole fowl rather than any tender cut.