Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Consomme with Green Peas
Consomme with Green Peas
Cut into pieces half a breast of a cooked chicken, put in a tureen, add two tablespoonfuls of boiled rice, two tablespoonfuls of cooked green peas, and one truffle cut into dice. Pour one quart of boiling consomme over all.
A garnished consommé in the classic hotel style: the bowl is composed cold, the hot broth poured over at the last second. Everything depends on the clarity and strength of the consommé, since nothing here is cooked in it.
- The hingeThe consommé must be at a hard boil when it goes into the tureen. The cold garnish will drop the temperature several degrees, and a lukewarm consommé tastes flat and greasy in a way a hot one never does.
- Consommé, not stockThis means clarified brown or chicken stock, raft-cleared with egg white and lean ground meat, then degreased until the surface shows no beads of fat. A cloudy or fatty broth ruins the effect, since the whole point is that you can see the garnish through it.
- TruffleA fresh black truffle is a serious expense now; Oscar's kitchen used them routinely. Preserved truffle in its own juice is the closest reasonable substitute, and the juice can go into the consommé. Omitting the truffle entirely leaves a perfectly good soup, but do not substitute truffle oil, which is usually a synthetic flavouring and will overwhelm the broth.
- The chickenHalf a breast from a cooked bird, cut into neat dice or short julienne. Poached rather than roasted is better here; roast breast throws off a browned flavour that fights the clean broth.
- Rice and peasBoth are cooked separately and drained well. Rice boiled in the consommé itself will cloud it with starch, which is exactly what the clarification was for.
- YieldOne quart serves four as a first course, or two generously. Scale the garnish with the broth rather than the number of bowls.
- ServingWarm the tureen or the bowls first. A quart of boiling liquid poured into cold porcelain loses a good deal of its heat before it reaches the table.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms at a moment when American hotel cookery took its vocabulary wholesale from the French repertoire, and consommé garnishes were the most codified part of that vocabulary — a clear soup was identified almost entirely by what was floating in it. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire lists well over a hundred named consommés on exactly this principle, each a fixed combination of garnish rather than a distinct broth. The rice-and-truffle-and-poultry combination here belongs to that family, and the fact that the recipe is barely three lines long tells you what was assumed: any Waldorf cook already had gallons of clarified consommé standing ready, and the only instruction worth writing down was the assembly of the bowl.