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POTAGE (a la Xavier)
Mix the well-beaten yolks of four eggs and the white of one with three-quarters of a pint of flour. Add a little pepper and salt, the eighth part of a nutmeg, grated, and a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, and mix all the ingredients thoroughly. Stir in as much stock as will make the batter thin enough to pass through a colander. Boil two parts of strained and nicely-flavoured stock. Put the batter into it by means of a ladle perforated with holes, and stir well as long as it is on the fire. Skim carefully. Boil a quarter of an hour longer, and serve. Probable cost, exclusive of the stock, 7d. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A clear soup garnished with threads of egg batter dropped through a perforated ladle — a French consommé garnish, here scaled for a large household. The whole thing hangs on the batter's consistency and on keeping the stock below a rolling boil.
- The hinge: batter consistencyThe batter must be loose enough to fall through the holes in threads, but not so thin that it disperses into cloudy shreds. Thin it with stock a spoonful at a time and test one ladleful before committing the rest.
- "Three-quarters of a pint of flour"A volume measure of dry flour: three-quarters of an imperial pint is about 425 ml, so roughly 1 3/4 US cups, or somewhere around 8 oz by weight. Weigh it if you can; scooped flour varies considerably in density and this batter is sensitive to it.
- "Two parts" of stock is ambiguousThe original gives no unit. For eight or nine servings you need something in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 quarts of consommé; treat "two parts" as two quarts and adjust to taste rather than trying to reconstruct a Victorian proportion.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil emulsifies fat and suspended protein and turns clear stock murky, undoing the point of the dish. Hold it at a bare shiver, just below simmer, while the batter goes in.
- Fifteen minutes is far too longThese are threads of egg batter a few millimetres thick; they set in well under two minutes and then begin to swell, soften and break up. Cook them through, skim, and serve.
- The perforated ladleA colander, a skimmer with round holes, or a potato ricer held over the pot all work. Hole size sets the garnish: small holes give vermicelli-like threads, large ones give soft nubs.
- Stock quality is the recipeThe batter contributes almost nothing but texture. Use a well-clarified, properly seasoned beef or veal consommé; a weak or cloudy stock cannot be rescued at this stage.
- YieldEight or nine as a first course, as stated — about a cup of soup each with a modest garnish.
Consommé or potage à la Xavier belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of clear soups distinguished entirely by their garnish, a system codified in the grand kitchens and later fixed in print by Escoffier, who lists Xavier among dozens of named consommés. The garnish here — an egg-and-flour batter pressed through holes into simmering broth so it sets in threads — is a cousin of Italian passatelli and German Eierstich or Backerbsen, all solutions to the same problem of giving body to a clear soup without clouding it. The name is generally traced to one of the several royal and noble Xaviers of the period, though which one is not documented, and dish names of this kind were often bestowed by a chef in flattery rather than recorded. Its appearance in Cassell's, priced at sevenpence exclusive of stock, shows how thoroughly restaurant French had been absorbed into the English middle-class household book: the assumption is that a good pot of stock is already standing in the kitchen, and the cook's ambition is what to do with it.