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Consomme Stock
Cut finely a shin of beef, put it in a stockpot with two scraped carrots, two peeled onions, three washed leeks, a few sticks of celery, and a small bunch of parsley roots, all finely minced; add six cloves, one teaspoonful of peppercorns, a bay leaf, and the whites and shells of six eggs. Moisten this with two gallons of broth and one quart of water, stir for a few minutes, place on the range, add a few pieces of chicken or bones if handy. Simmer for four hours, skim off the grease and strain through a wet cloth.
This is a classic clarified consommé built on an existing broth rather than on water, so it assumes you already have stock in the house. The egg whites and shells are not seasoning — they are the clarifying raft, and everything else follows from how you treat them.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the egg white goes in, the pot must come up slowly and hold at a bare simmer where a few bubbles break the surface. A rolling boil shreds the raft and pushes the coagulated protein back through the liquid, and no amount of straining afterwards will make it clear again.
- Stir only until it setsThe instruction to "stir for a few minutes" applies while the pot is still cold or barely warm. Stop as soon as the egg white begins to cloud and knit together, and do not disturb it after that.
- A shin of beefAsk for beef shin, sliced across the bone, or use shank meat plus a couple of sawn marrow bones. "Cut finely" here means chopped small so the meat gives up its flavour and its albumin quickly — hand-chopped or coarsely ground both work.
- Parsley rootsHamburg parsley root was a standard European soup vegetable and is still sold at Eastern European and farmers' markets. Parsnip is the usual substitute; a large bunch of parsley stems will give the herbal note but not the sweetness.
- ScaleTwo gallons of broth plus a quart of water is restaurant volume — nine quarts, roughly 8.5 litres, needing a pot of at least 12 quarts and comfortably more once the meat and vegetables go in. Halving or quartering the whole list works without adjustment, keeping the ratio of about three egg whites per gallon of liquid.
- Skimming and strainingSkim the grease off before you disturb the raft, then ladle the consommé out through a cloth-lined sieve rather than pouring the pot. A cloth wetted and wrung out first will not absorb your stock or shed lint into it.
- Fat removalChilling the strained consommé overnight lifts the last of the fat as a solid cap, which is easier and more complete than skimming hot. The set jelly is also the best sign that the shin did its work.
- SeasoningOscar adds no salt at any point, and the liquid concentrates over four hours. Season at the end, off the heat, once you know the finished strength.
- YieldExpect to lose a quarter to a third to evaporation and to the raft, leaving roughly 6 quarts from the full recipe — about twenty-four first-course cups.
Consomm" or "consummated" — was the backbone of the formal menu in Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf, where by the convention of the day a clear soup generally opened dinner and a thick one was often the alternative for those who wanted it. The technique of clarifying with lean chopped meat and egg white was long-established in French professional practice well before the nineteenth century; the dozens of named consomm", Julienne, Royale, and the rest) are all garnishes dropped into a base like this one. Note that the recipe starts from two gallons of broth, not water: in a hotel kitchen the stockpot ran continuously, and a page like this documents a second stage in a system rather than a dish made from scratch. Parsley root and leeks in the aromatic mix place the kitchen squarely in the Continental tradition its Swiss-born ma tre d'h tel came from.