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Duchess Consomme
Mix thoroughly 1/2 cup bread crumbs, 1/2 cup soft cheese, 1 egg, 1 saltspoonful salt, and a dash of cayenne; form into little balls, roll in egg and drop quickly into boiling water; if put into the stock, it will become clouded. Take them up with skimmer, put into hot tureen, pour over them the boiling stock.
This is a garnish rather than a soup in itself: cheese dumplings poached apart from the broth so the consommé stays crystalline. The clarity of the finished bowl depends entirely on that separation.
- The hingePoach the balls in plain water, never in the stock. Bread crumbs and cheese shed starch and fat that will cloud a consommé in seconds, and no amount of skimming afterwards recovers the transparency.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. With cheese in the mix, taste before adding all of it.
- Soft cheeseMost likely a fresh, spoonable cheese here: cottage or farmer's cheese, drained well, rather than a soft-ripened rind cheese, though period use of the term is not wholly consistent. Ricotta pressed in a sieve works. Too wet a cheese and the balls fall apart in the water.
- Two eggs, in effectOne egg binds the mixture; the coating egg called for at the end is a second, beaten separately. Chill the formed balls for twenty minutes before coating so they hold their shape.
- Poaching, not boilingBring the water to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer once the balls go in. A rolling boil breaks them up. They are done when they float and feel firm, about three to four minutes for balls the size of a hazelnut.
- The stockNo quantity is given; the consomme is assumed to be made separately. Allow roughly 1 cup of clarified, well-seasoned broth per serving, brought to a full boil before it goes over the dumplings.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and the count depends entirely on how small the balls are rolled; allow three or four per bowl.
- AssemblyWarm the tureen or the bowls first. Cold china plus room-temperature dumplings will pull a boiling consommé down below serving temperature immediately.
Named garnishes were how nineteenth-century kitchens distinguished one clear soup from another: the consomme itself was a single house preparation, and calling it Duchesse, Celestine or Julienne described only what was floating in it. The convention comes out of French professional practice, where a long roster of consomme garnishes was catalogued. A clarified consomme represented real labour in bones, egg white and skimming, which is the point of poaching the balls in water rather than in the stock.