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Half an Onion (Seasoning About three whites)
Seasoning. About three whites of Eggs.
Mince the beef, pour over a small quantity of water, add to it the paste and powder, and thoroughly mix. Stir this to the stock, with the three whites and the shell of one egg, and stir with spoon until it boils. Allow it to simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Strain through a cloth. If you have bones of roast chicken they are an improvement. Serve with some pieces of cooked chicken and well-boiled rice; the chicken served with the soup, the rice served separately.
This is the tail end of a clear curried soup — the page has been split so that only the last line of the ingredient list ("About three whites of Eggs") survives above the method. What remains is a complete, usable lesson in clarifying stock, provided you supply the quantities yourself.
- The missing ingredientsThe "paste and powder" are most likely curry paste and curry powder, and the half onion of the title belongs in the same list. For a clarification of this type, reckon on about 8 oz lean minced beef and 2 egg whites per quart of stock; on that reckoning the book's three whites suggest something like 3 pints of stock in the original.
- The hinge: stop stirring at the boilStir constantly while the stock comes up, then leave it absolutely alone. The beef, egg white and crushed shell coagulate into a raft that traps the fine sediment; break that raft with a spoon and the soup will cloud.
- Start with cold stockThe stock must be cold or barely tepid when the beef and whites go in. Hot stock sets the egg white before it has dispersed and the clarification does nothing at all.
- Degrease firstChill the stock and lift off the fat before clarifying. Fat suspended in the liquid will cloud a consommé that is otherwise faultless, and no amount of straining removes it.
- "Simmer for three-quarters of an hour"Interpret this generously: the surface should barely tremble, with no rolling bubbles. Forty-five minutes is right for a soup of this depth.
- Straining through a clothScald a linen cloth or double muslin, wring it out, and ladle rather than pour. Lift the raft aside with a skimmer, then let the soup pass through by gravity — pressing or squeezing the cloth forces sediment through.
- Chicken bonesRoast chicken bones are worth adding for body and flavour, but crack them and add them at the start of the simmer, not after.
Clarifying stock with lean minced meat, egg whites and crushed shell is the standard nineteenth-century route to consommé, and its appearance in a book of "high class cookery" is not incidental — the technique is unforgiving of haste and impossible to fake. The curry paste and powder here are usually taken to place the dish in the long British tradition of Anglo-Indian clear soups that followed mulligatawny into the dining rooms of the later Victorian period, with the boiled rice sent round separately in the Indian manner rather than sitting in the bowl. Commercial curry pastes and powders were sold in tins and bottles by firms whose blends varied considerably, though many cooks still mixed their own, which is why recipes of the era so often name them without further explanation and why the seasoning of any reconstruction is a matter of tasting rather than measuring.