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Consomme with Pearl Barley
Wash three tablespoonfuls of pearl barley, put in a saucepan with three pints of consomme, and let boil for forty minutes. Add two tablespoonfuls of cooked breast of chicken cut in dice, two tablespoonfuls of cooked green peas, and serve in a hot tureen.
A clear soup garnished at the last moment, in the classic hotel manner. The only real decision is how much barley starch you are willing to let into the broth.
- QuantitiesThree pints is six cups, enough for roughly six small first-course servings. Three tablespoons of pearl barley is sparse: this is a consommé with barley in it, not a barley soup.
- Cook the barley separately for a clear soupForty minutes of boiling releases enough starch to cloud a consommé that was clarified with care. Cooking the barley separately in salted water or a little stock, rinsing it, and adding it to the hot consommé at the end is a standard way to keep the broth clear. If you follow the text as written, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil and skim.
- Barley timingPearl barley is usually tender in 25 to 35 minutes. Taste at 25; overcooked pearl barley bursts and turns the broth gluey.
- ConsomméThe book assumes a properly clarified beef or chicken consommé. Good boxed broth works, but reduce it slightly and season carefully, since barley absorbs both liquid and salt.
- The garnishes are already cookedChicken breast and peas go in only to heat through, a minute at most. Poached or leftover roast breast, cut in small even dice, holds better than anything reheated at length.
- PeasFrozen peas are closer to fresh spring peas than canned; drop them in at the very end so they stay green.
- ServingA heated tureen matters more than it sounds: six cups of clear soup in a cold vessel arrive lukewarm. Warm the bowls as well.
Oscar Tschirky's book is associated with a large New York hotel kitchen, and its soup chapter turns repeatedly on one mother liquid — consommé — dressed in many different ways. The French kitchen convention was that the garnish named the soup, so a cook reading this page would already know how to make and clarify the consommé and only needed the two lines telling him what went into it. Pearl barley, hulled and polished into round grains, was the humblest of these garnishes and among the oldest, barley having been a European soup grain long before rice or pasta were common; its appearance in such a book shows how readily the grand hotels borrowed from plain domestic cooking, provided the broth beneath it was faultless.