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Consomme a l'Imperatrice
An Elaborate Dinner Soup Put a level tablespoonful each of butter and flour into a saucepan with 1/2 cup milk, stir till it boils, and add 1/2 teaspoonful onion juice, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 1/2 saltspoonful mace, salt and pepper, and 1/2 cup chopped chicken; mix thoroughly and turn out to cool. At serving time make this into small balls, roll in egg, and drop quickly into hot fat or oil, and drain on soft brown paper. Have 1/2 pint of fresh green peas and 4 tablespoonfuls of rice carefully boiled, and put in soup tureen--turn in hot chicken consomme--drop in the forcemeat balls, and serve at once.
A clear chicken consommé finished at the table with three garnishes: peas, rice, and fried chicken forcemeat balls. The forcemeat is a thick white panade, and its success depends entirely on chilling it hard before frying.
- Chill the forcemeatThe recipe has you turn the mixture out to cool and shape it only at serving time; chill it thoroughly so it is firm before frying, or the balls may slump and burst in the fat.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of mace is a scant eighth of a teaspoon. Ground mace is potent and stale mace tastes of nothing; buy it in small amounts.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. Half a teaspoon is about what a quarter of a small onion yields.
- Rolling in eggBeaten whole egg alone gives a thin, patchy coating. Roll the chilled balls in flour, then egg, then fine dry crumbs for a shell that holds while frying.
- Frying temperatureOil at 365-375F. The filling is already cooked, so the balls need only 60-90 seconds to colour; longer and the panade turns to paste inside.
- Soft brown paperThis is the period's paper towel. Drain on a rack set over a sheet pan, or on paper towels, and keep warm in a 200F oven while the tureen is filled.
- Peas and riceHalf a pint of shelled fresh peas is about a cup by volume; frozen peas work and need only a minute. Cook the rice separately in salted water and rinse it, or the starch will cloud the consommé, which defeats the point of the soup.
- ServingThe consommé must be very hot, near boiling, since the garnishes cool it fast. The recipe gives no quantity of consommé; this amount of garnish suits a few small first-course servings, and it will not hold: assemble at the table.
Nineteenth-century French kitchens catalogued consommés less by how the broth was made than by what was dropped into it at the last moment, and each combination carried a proper name a trained cook was expected to know. Chicken quenelles or fried forcemeat with green peas and rice is one garnish recorded under à l'impératrice, though the classical lists are not consistent about it; the name belongs to a long family of imperial and royal titles attached to clear soups in the later nineteenth century. American household compilations of the turn of the century reprinted these names freely, partly as instruction and partly as aspiration: a hostess who could send in a garnished consommé signalled that her kitchen followed continental practice. The heading here, "An Elaborate Dinner Soup," is the book being honest about the labour involved, since the recipe presumes you already have a clarified chicken consommé standing by.