Clear Soups
Take strong, well flavored stock, and clear it. For "additions," each of which gives its name to the soup, a great many things may be used, as the various soup balls, rice, noodles, macaroni, poached eggs, cheese (grated), spaghetti, vermicelli (to any of which chopped parsley may be effectively added), and almost any vegetable, diced, chopped or grated in strings, and then cooked.-E. M. K.
This is a formula rather than a recipe: the whole dish rests on the stock and on the clarifying, and the "additions" are simply the garnish that names the soup. Two lines of nineteenth-century shorthand cover a good deal of work.
- "Clear it" is the whole jobClarifying means whisking egg whites (about two whites, plus the crushed shells, per 2 quarts) into cold, degreased stock, bringing it to a bare simmer without stirring, and letting the raft that forms hold there for 30-45 minutes. Ladle the broth out through the raft and strain it through a damp cloth; boiling hard will break the raft and cloud the soup irreversibly.
- Chill and skim firstFat is the other cause of cloudiness. Refrigerate the stock so the fat sets on top and lift it off in a sheet before you begin, rather than trying to skim a warm pot.
- "Strong, well flavored"A clear soup has nothing to hide behind, so reduce the stock until it tastes assertive before clarifying, and season at the end. Clarifying strips a little flavour as well as sediment.
- Soup ballsThe period term for small forcemeat, marrow or egg dumplings poached separately. Cook all additions — pasta, rice, dumplings, vegetables — in a separate pan of water or stock and add them to the hot consommé at serving; boiling starch in the finished broth will cloud it again.
- Naming the soupThe convention this entry describes is the classical one: broth plus royale, plus vermicelli, plus julienne of vegetables, and so on. "Grated in strings" appears to mean what a modern kitchen calls julienne, cut fine on a mandoline or the coarse side of a box grater.
- Poached eggs and cheesePoach the eggs in water with a little vinegar, trim the ragged whites, and slip one into each warmed bowl before pouring the broth over. Grated cheese goes on at the table, not in the pot.
- Yield and servingAllow about 1 cup of clear soup per person as a first course, served very hot in warmed bowls. The recipe specifies no quantities; note only that some volume is lost to the raft and to straining, so finished consomme will measure appreciably less than the stock you started with.
Clear soup is the household-manual version of French consommé, and the confidence of these two sentences shows how far that idea had travelled: the writer assumes any reader with a stockpot knows how to clarify, and needs only a list of garnishes. The naming convention — consommé julienne, consommé vermicelli, consommé royale — comes out of the professional kitchen, where the clear broth was a fixed base and the garnish supplied the name on the menu. Clear soups also carried a dietary reputation in this period, being widely recommended as light and restorative for invalids and as the correct opening to a formal dinner, where a thick soup would have been thought heavy. The initials "E. M. K." mark this as a contributed entry, a common feature of compiled and community cookbooks generally.