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Celery (Cup sliced onion tablespoons)
3 lbs. beef, poorer part of round 3 lbs. knuckle of veal Turnip } 1/3 cup each, cut in dice 1/3 cup sliced onion 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon salt 1 teaspoon peppercorns 4 cloves 3 sprigs thyme 1 sprig marjoram 2 sprigs parsley 1/2 bay leaf 3 quarts cold water Cut beef in one and one-half inch cubes, and brown onehalf in some of the marrow from marrow-bone; put remaining half in kettle with cold water, add veal cut in pieces, browned meat, and bones. Let stand one-half hour. Heat slowly to boiling-point, and let simmer three hours, removing scum as it forms on top of kettle. Add one quart liquor in which a fowl was cooked, and simmer two hours. Cook carrot, turnip, onion, and celery in butter five minutes; then add to soup, with remaining seasonings. Cook one and one-half hours, strain, cool quickly, remove fat, and clear.
Consommé à la Royal Consummé, served with Royal custard.
Consommé au Parmesan Consummé, served with Parmesan Pâte à Chou.
Consommé Colbert To six cups Consommé add one-third cup each of cooked green peas, flageolets, carrots cut in small cubes, and celery cut in small pieces. Serve a poached egg in each plate of soup.
Consommé aux Pâtes Consommé, served with noodles, macaroni, spaghetti, or any Italian pastes, first cooked in boiling salted water. Consommé d'Orleans Consommé, served with red and white quenelles and French peas.
Consommé with Vegetables Consommé, served with French string beans, and cooked carrots cut in fancy shapes with French vegetable cutters. Consommé Princess Consommé, served with green peas and cooked chicken meat cut in small dice.
Claret Consommé To one quart Consommé add one and one-half cups claret, which has been cooked with a three-inch piece stick cinnamon ten minutes and one tablespoon sugar. Color red.
Bortchock Consommé Make same as Consommé, adding one-third cup chopped beets with vegetables; then add one cup finely chopped beets when clearing.
This is Farmer's basic consommé with a run of classical garnishes appended. The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — the aromatics and water survive, but the quantities of beef, veal, marrow-bone and root vegetables have dropped out of the text.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for beef, veal, a marrow-bone, carrot, turnip, onion and celery that the printed list no longer names in measured amounts. The book's own figures cannot be recovered from this page; treat any quantities quoted for it as a reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- The hinge: never let it boilEverything about consommé depends on a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and breaks up albumen, and no amount of clearing afterwards will give you a bright cup.
- Browning half the meatHalf raw, half browned in marrow is deliberate — the browned cubes give colour and roast flavour, the raw ones give clean gelatine and a clear extraction. Skipping the split gives you either a pale stock or a muddy one.
- "Clear" means an egg-white raftThe instruction to "clear" assumes a technique the book explains elsewhere: whisk a lightly beaten egg white and its crushed shell into the cold, degreased stock, bring it slowly up while stirring, then stop stirring and let the raft form. Ladle the consommé out through the raft; do not tip the pot.
- Cool quicklySix and a half hours of stock left to cool on the back of the stove is the one genuinely risky step. Strain into a shallow pan or a bowl set in ice water, bring it down to room temperature within about two hours and get it into the refrigerator promptly, then lift the set fat off the top.
- Fowl liquorThe quart of "liquor in which a fowl was cooked" is the poaching broth from a boiled hen, an economy in a household that had one to hand. Unsalted chicken stock stands in, but reduce the tablespoon of salt accordingly, since the recipe salts before any reduction has happened.
- Flageolets and quenellesFlageolets are small pale-green French shell beans, sold dried or tinned. Quenelles here are poached forcemeat dumplings of veal or chicken; the red ones in Consommé d'Orléans are typically tinted rather than differently flavoured, though the recipe does not say with what.
- Pâte à chou and Royal custardParmesan pâte à chou means tiny unsweetened choux puffs made with cheese and dropped in at the table. Royal custard is a firm savoury egg custard, set in a shallow pan, cooled and cut into diamonds or rounds — it must be cool and set before cutting or it shreds.
- BortchockFarmer's spelling of borscht. Chopped beet added with the mirepoix gives flavour; the second cup of raw beet added at the clearing stage is there for colour, since beet pigment survives the clarification that would strip it from a longer cook.
Consomm\soup judged almost entirely on clarity, requiring pounds of meat to produce a few cups of liquid that looked like tea. The garnish names Farmer lists are the standard vocabulary of French restaurant cookery as codified in the nineteenth century oyroyale for the diced savoury custard, Colbert for the poached egg, Princesse for chicken and green peas a thoroughly American middle-class entertaining had adopted French service terms by the end of the nineteenth century, though the list cannot be pinned to a particular edition. That the book prints a Russian beet consomm hphonetic spelling "Bortchock" in the same list is a reminder that these were culinary fashions as much as traditions. The technique itself is older than the vocabulary: clarifying broth with egg white and shell is described in European cookery writing well before the restaurant era, and the underlying principle, that coagulating albumen traps suspended particles as it rises, is unchanged.