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Consomme with Egg Balls
3 pints consomme; 2 egg yolks, hard-boiled; 2 egg whites, beaten stiff. The eggs may be separated and the yolks dropped carefully into boiling water and boiled hard. Mash them, add one-half as much cracker flour as egg, season with salt and cayenne, moisten with cream, and bind with raw egg. Make into balls the size of marbles. Drop these into the boiling consomme, cook five minutes, add a dash of nutmeg and a tablespoonful of wine. Serve with a spoonful of the stiffly beaten whites of egg on the top of each plate.
A clear soup dressed up with two garnishes made from a single egg: the yolks bound into small dumplings, the whites whipped and floated on top. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once you have stock.
- The hinge: keep the balls small and the soup barely boilingMarble-sized means about 1/2 inch; much larger and the centres may not heat through in five minutes, and bigger balls are more likely to break up. A hard boil can knock them apart, so hold the consomme at a bare simmer, although the recipe as written says to drop them into boiling soup.
- Cracker flourFinely rolled or ground plain soda crackers, sifted to a coarse flour. Unsalted saltines or water biscuits crushed in a food processor give the same thing; adjust the added salt accordingly.
- Cooking the yolks separatelySeparating raw eggs and dropping the bare yolks into simmering water is the old method and it works, but hard-boiling whole eggs and then separating is simpler and gives you the whites intact for the garnish. Either way the yolks must be fully firm or the paste will not hold.
- "Bind with raw egg"Use a small amount of beaten whole egg, added a teaspoon at a time, until the mashed yolk and cracker crumb hold together as a stiff paste. Too much and the balls slump in the soup.
- 3 pints consomm\toSix cups, which serves six as a first course. A good homemade or well-reduced stock matters more here than anything else, since nothing in the recipe adds body.
- The wineA tablespoon of dry sherry or Madeira is the likely reading of "wine" in a clear soup of this period, though the recipe does not specify. The recipe adds it to the hot soup; adding it off the heat keeps more of the aroma.
- The beaten whites on topThey are dropped raw onto the hot soup and warm through only at the surface. If raw egg white is a concern for anyone at the table, use pasteurized whites or leave the garnish off; the soup stands perfectly well without it.
- SeasoningCayenne and nutmeg both go in small quantities here. A dash means a pinch, well short of anything you would taste as heat or spice on its own.