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Consomme with Larkin Tapioca
For six cups of consomme allow three teaspoons of Larkin Pearl Tapioca. Cook this in seven cups of boiling water to which has been added a bay-leaf. When the tapioca is clear, add one and one-half teaspoons of Larkin Extract of Beef and season to taste with Larkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper.
A wartime-thrifty sort of clear soup: the "consomme" is built from beef extract rather than a clarified stock, with tapioca pearls standing in for the usual noodle or custard garnish. The branding is Larkin's own, but nothing in it is proprietary.
- The Larkin productsLarkin Pearl Tapioca is plain small pearl tapioca; Larkin Extract of Beef would have been a concentrated beef extract of the Bovril or Liebig type, sold as a paste or thick liquid. Any beef bouillon paste or concentrate works, as does a strong reduced beef stock in place of both extract and water.
- Pearl, not instantUse true pearl tapioca, not the instant granules or the large boba pearls. Small pearls need roughly 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer to lose their opaque centres; the recipe's cue, "when the tapioca is clear," is the only doneness test you need.
- Seven cups to sixThe extra cup covers what the tapioca absorbs and what boils away while it cooks; the recipe does not say which. Cook uncovered and expect roughly the stated yield.
- Season at the endBeef extract is heavily salted. Stir it in, taste, and only then add salt, or the finished soup will be brackish.
- Pull the bay leafThe original never says to remove it. Fish it out before serving; a bay leaf left in a clear soup keeps getting stronger and is unpleasant to bite.
- It thickens on standingTapioca goes on absorbing liquid off the heat, and reheated leftovers set toward a gel. Serve it as soon as it is seasoned, and thin any second-day soup with hot stock rather than water.
- YieldSix cups, which is four generous first-course servings or six small ones.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, began in 1875 as a soap manufacturer and grew into one of the largest mail-order houses in the United States, selling direct to households and rewarding them with premiums under the slogan of the "Larkin Idea" — furniture, china and, famously, an office building by Frank Lloyd Wright. By the early twentieth century the catalogue had expanded well past soap into groceries, extracts and spices, and cookbooks like this one existed to demonstrate that a whole meal could be assembled from Larkin-branded tins and packets. The recipe is a fair snapshot of what that meant for soup: a genuine consommé is clarified from meat, bones and egg white over hours, while this one is a spoonful of beef paste in hot water, garnished with tapioca to give the eye something to follow. Tapioca, milled from cassava root and imported in pearl form, had been a standard invalid and nursery food since the mid-nineteenth century, which is part of why it reads here as gentle and respectable rather than exotic.