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Chicken Consomme
Remove the fillets from two chickens and put the carcases with six pounds of fillet of veal into a stockpot with five quarts of good stock, season with half an ounce of salt, place the pot on the fire and boil; skim it well, add two onions stuck with two cloves each, a head of celery and four leeks. Let the pot simmer on the side of the fire for about three hours, skim off the fat, strain the broth and clarify with the fillets of chicken previously removed; then strain once more through a cloth into a basin. This consomme should be colorless.
A classic double-strength consommé built on veal and chicken, clarified with raw chicken breast rather than the egg-white raft most cooks know today. The whole point is clarity and pallor, and nearly every instruction serves that end.
- Never let it boil after the first skimA rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives protein into suspension, which is exactly what makes a consommé cloudy and grey. "Simmer on the side of the fire" means a bare tremble at the surface, around 180–190F, for the full three hours.
- Fillet of vealIn Oscar's kitchen this is lean meat from the leg or loin, not a chop or the modern "fillet" cut. Six pounds of any lean veal, cubed, does the work; veal shank or knuckle adds gelatin if you want more body, at slight cost to clarity.
- The chicken fillets are the clarificationThe two breasts removed at the start are ground or finely chopped, mixed with a little cold stock, stirred into the cooled broth, and brought slowly up to a simmer without stirring once it begins to set. The meat proteins coagulate and carry the cloud with them. Egg white, or egg white plus lean ground chicken, gives the same result and is easier to source.
- Cool before clarifyingThe strained broth should be cooled to lukewarm before the raw chicken goes in; added to hot broth the protein sets on contact instead of gathering the cloud as it rises. This step is the hinge of the recipe.
- Keep everything pale"Colorless" rules out browning the bones or the onions, and rules out carrot, which tints the broth orange. The onions are used raw, studded with cloves; the cut faces should not be charred as they would be for a brown stock.
- A head of celeryThe whole bunch, not a single rib, leaves included. Four leeks means white and pale green parts, split and washed thoroughly.
- Straining"Through a cloth" means a doubled piece of damp muslin or a fine cheesecloth-lined sieve, ladled rather than poured, so the sediment at the bottom of the pot stays there.
- YieldFive quarts of stock will lose some volume over three hours' simmering and again at each straining; expect somewhere around three and a half to four quarts of finished consomme, enough for twenty or so first-course servings. Refrigerate and use within three or four days, or freeze; the jellied set when cold is a sign you did it right.
- SeasoningHalf an ounce of salt is about one tablespoon, and it is deliberately light because the stock is already seasoned and the liquid reduces. Adjust only at the very end, after clarification.
Consommé — from the French for "completed" or "consummated" — is stock taken to its logical extreme: a broth built on an already-made stock, then stripped of every particle that clouds it. By the late nineteenth century a kitchen's consommés were a measure of its seriousness, and Escoffier's generation codified dozens of named variations built on this base. The version here is a consommé blanc or white consommé, the pale one used for delicate garnishes and for invalid cookery, as against the amber brown consommé made from roasted bones. Here the clarification is done with raw minced chicken rather than egg white, and the broth gains flavor as it is cleared. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, and recipes like this one — five quarts of stock, six pounds of veal, two whole chickens sacrificed for a clear soup — reflect a brigade kitchen where nothing was scaled for a household.