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Broth Thickened with Eggs
Take enough good game or fowl consomme, and to each half pint add the yolk of one egg, and beat in and thicken it with a little flour.
A one-line instruction that assumes the reader already knows how egg yolks behave in hot liquid. The technique is sound, but everything depends on temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolk goes in, hold the broth below about 180F. A simmer will scramble the yolk into threads and the broth turns grainy instead of velvety.
- Temper firstBeat the yolk with the flour and a few spoonfuls of hot consomme in a bowl, then whisk that back into the pan off the heat. Adding a cold yolk straight to hot broth is how the curdling happens.
- Half a pintOne cup, eight fluid ounces. So one yolk per cup of broth, which is a rich ratio; a scant yolk per cup is plenty if you want the broth still to read as a broth.
- "A little flour"Genuinely unspecified. A rounded teaspoon per cup gives body without pastiness. The flour here is as much insurance against curdling as it is a thickener, since starch raises the temperature at which yolk proteins seize.
- ConsommeIn period usage this meant a stock clarified with egg white and lean minced meat, then strained to a bright, fat-free liquid; the recipe itself gives no method. A good unsalted commercial stock, degreased and reduced slightly, stands in; the thickening will look cloudy rather than glossy if the base is greasy.
- Game or fowlPheasant, partridge and grouse were within reach of a hotel kitchen of the period. Roast chicken or turkey bones give the same effect, with a little more depth if you brown them first.
- YieldFigure a cup per person as a first course. Serve immediately; reheating past a bare steam will break it.
Thickening a clear soup with egg yolk is one of the oldest liaisons in European cookery, often said to have been formalised in French kitchens and carried into American hotel dining rooms by chefs trained in that system. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, was maitre d'hotel rather than chef, and his 1896 book reads like a working reference for a brigade already fluent in the technique, which is why the entry runs to a single sentence with no temperatures and no quantities of flour. Game consomme in particular signals the period, when wild birds in season were a familiar presence on hotel menus as a luxury.