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One Yolk
One ounce of Flour.
Half a gill of Milk.
One dessertspoonful of chopped Parsley.
One teaspoonful of chopped Tarragon and Chervil.
One dessertspoonful of grated Parmesan Cheese.
Half an ounce of Butter for frying.
Make a batter in the usual way, fry as pancakes a light brown in the butter, toss, and then drain on paper, cut in very thin shreds. Serve in boiling consommé.
A herb pancake shredded into fine threads and dropped into hot consommé — a soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right. The title supplies the ingredient the list omits: one egg yolk binds the batter.
- The batterOne yolk, 1 oz flour (a scant 1/4 cup, about 3 1/2 tablespoons), and the milk. It should be thin enough to run across the pan like a crêpe; a thick pancake batter will not shred cleanly.
- Half a gillIn British books of this period a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz, or 5 tablespoons. American texts of the same era often use a 4 fl oz gill. Start with the smaller amount and thin the batter further if it does not coat the pan.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. So roughly 2 teaspoons chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon tarragon and chervil together, and 2 teaspoons grated Parmesan.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh; look for it at farmers' markets in spring or grow it. Dried chervil contributes almost nothing. If it is unavailable, use only tarragon and a little extra parsley rather than substituting dill.
- FryingHalf an ounce (1 tablespoon) of butter is enough for two or three thin pancakes in a well-seasoned or nonstick pan. Keep the heat at medium — Parmesan and butter both colour fast, and the pancakes want to be pale gold, not brown-edged and brittle.
- ShreddingLet the pancakes cool flat and stack them, then roll the stack and slice across into threads no more than 1/8 inch wide. Cold pancakes cut far more neatly than warm ones.
- ServingPut the shreds into hot bowls and pour the boiling consommé over at the table. Left to sit in the liquid they soften and clump within a few minutes. The quantity of batter is small, so it will garnish only a few cups of soup.
Shredded pancake in clear soup is one of the standard garnishes of nineteenth-century professional kitchens, related to the Austrian Frittatensuppe. Its purpose is textural and decorative: a consommé had to be brilliantly clear, so anything added to it was cooked separately and dropped in at the last moment, and cookery books of the 1880s and 1890s list dozens of such garnishes — royales, quenelles, profiteroles, vermicelli, printanier vegetables — each giving a differently named soup from the same broth. The herbs here are the classic fines herbes group less the chives. Recipes of this kind assume a household or hotel kitchen with stock always on the stove, which is why the original bothers to specify nothing about the consommé itself.