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Consomme Royale
Have four pounds of shin beef cut into small pieces. Wash it and place it in a kettle with four quarts of cold water, and set the kettle over the fire. Cut into fine pieces one carrot, one turnip, two small onions, four sprigs of parsley and two stalks of celery. Fry them brown in butter. When the juices are drawn from the meat, add the vegetables, four teaspoons of salt, one saltspoon of white pepper and four teaspoons of mixed herbs (sage, summer savory, marjoram, bay leaves and thyme), tied up in a bit of muslin with eight cloves and eight allspices. Let the water boil, then set the kettle where it will simmer for six or seven hours. Strain through a cloth into a stone jar and let it stand for twenty-four hours. When ready to serve, remove the cake of fat from the top, heat two quarts of the consomme, color with a little caramel and flavor with lemon juice and sherry.
Beat two eggs with a spoon, add two tablespoons of milk, one-fourth teaspoon of salt and a dash of white pepper. Turn this into a buttered cup and place it in the oven in a pan of warm water. Let it bake until firm in the center when tried with a knife-from five to ten minutes. Cool, cut into small fancy shapes, place in the tureen and pour the boiling soup over the pieces. Serve at once with saltine crackers buttered and browned lightly. To save time in preparation, canned consomme or soup made from beef extract may be used, but it will not have the flavor of the homemade soup stock. Annabel Lee.
A long-simmered beef stock finished with a baked custard garnish -- the royale that gives the soup its name. Most of the work is unattended; the parts that need attention are the custard and the standing time.
- The hinge: the royale must not boil or blisterBake the egg-and-milk custard in its water bath until just set, then cool it before cutting. (The recipe names no oven temperature; a moderate oven is implied.) A custard baked hot or fast turns porous and falls apart in the tureen. The stated five to ten minutes reads short for a filled cup, so judge by the knife test rather than the clock.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Four teaspoons of salt in four quarts of water is a light seasoning for stock, which is correct -- it reduces and concentrates over six hours.
- Shin beefBeef shin, sometimes sold as shank or osso buco cut. The collagen is the point; it gives the body that makes the strained liquid set to a soft jelly when cold. Any leaner cut will yield thin, watery stock.
- The stone jar and the 24 hoursThe jar and the overnight rest belong to a cold larder. Strain into any non-reactive container, cool it quickly, and refrigerate it. Stock held at room temperature for a day is a straightforward spoilage risk.
- Not a clarified consommeClassical consomme is cleared with an egg-white raft. This one relies on gentle simmering and straining through cloth. The recipe brings the water to a boil and then sets the kettle where it will only simmer; a sustained rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and no amount of straining will bring it back clear.
- Caramel colouringSugar cooked dark to a bitter, almost black syrup and let down with a little water. The recipe asks only for 'a little.' Modern cooks can skip it; it adds colour and a faint bitterness, not flavour in any useful sense.
- Mixed herbsFour teaspoons of the dried mixture, tied in muslin with the spices -- a bouquet garni by another route. Go light on the sage, which dominates a long simmer.
- YieldFour quarts of water go into the kettle; at serving the recipe calls for heating two quarts of the strained stock, which is eight cups. It does not state the total yield, and some liquid is lost to the long simmer and to the fat lifted off the top.
The royale is a piece of French classical garniture that arrived in American cookbooks through the hotel and dinner-party kitchen: a savoury baked custard, cooled, cut into rounds, diamonds or crescents, and floated in clear soup. Its presence here signals a formal first course, the kind of soup that opens a dinner rather than feeding a family. The closing line is the more revealing one -- the recipe cheerfully offers canned consomme or beef extract as a substitute, and admits the flavour will suffer. Commercial beef extracts and canned soups were widely available by the time this book was compiled, and household cookery writing of the period is full of these negotiations between the seven-hour stockpot and the tin. The page carries only a signature: 'Annabel Lee.'