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Tapioca Broth
Place a chicken and a knuckle of veal in a saucepan or double boiler, with a few vegetables previously cooked in white broth, and pour over one gallon of cold water, set the saucepan on the fire and boil gently until the meat is done. Strain the broth through a cloth into another saucepan, remove the fat, and boil up once more; then add as much tapioca as may be required, letting it fall into the soup like rain. Remove the saucepan to the side of the fire, and cook gently for twenty minutes or so. If desired it can be thickened with yolks of eggs. Turn the soup into the tureen, and serve it very hot.
A classic clear consommé thickened with tapioca, written for a kitchen where a stockpot sat at the back of the range all day. The method is sound; the quantities need interpreting.
- The hinge: rain the tapioca inPearl tapioca dumped in at once clumps into a solid mass. Scatter it slowly over simmering, moving broth — the "like rain" is the whole instruction — and keep the liquid barely trembling so the pearls hydrate and go translucent without bursting.
- How much tapioca"As much as may be required" means roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of small pearl tapioca per quart of broth for a lightly bodied soup. Instant or minute tapioca will dissolve into paste; use small pearl and expect 15 to 20 minutes.
- A knuckle of vealThis is the joint end of the leg, sawn across — gelatin, not meat. Ask a butcher for veal knuckle or shank cut in two; beef marrow bones plus a split veal shank give a close result if veal is scarce.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock made from veal and chicken bones with no roasted colour. The recipe calls for vegetables that have already been cooked in such a broth; it does not say why.
- Boil gentlyTake this literally. A gallon of water with a whole bird and bones should sit at a bare simmer, around 185-195F; the recipe sets no time, only 'until the meat is done', which for the chicken will be well short of the point where a veal knuckle has given up its gelatin. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and clouds the broth.
- Chill to degreaseSkimming hot broth leaves fat behind, though the recipe degreases hot and boils up again straight away. If you have time, refrigerate the strained liquid and lift the solid cap off; a veal-knuckle stock should set at least softly.
- Thickening with yolksWhisk two or three yolks with a ladle of hot soup, return it off the heat, and hold below 180F. Once it boils the yolks curdle and the clarity is gone for good.
- YieldThe recipe fixes only the starting gallon; how much you finish with depends on how long it simmers. The poached chicken is a separate meal; nothing in the soup uses it.
Tapioca, the starch washed from cassava root, reached European kitchens through Brazil and was treated in the nineteenth century as a genteel invalid food — bland, digestible, easy on the stomach — before it became a soup garnish in its own right. Escoffier and his contemporaries listed consommé au tapioca among the standard clear soups, and Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, was working squarely in that French repertoire; the recipe assumes that a cook already has white broth on hand and a knuckle of veal in the larder. Tapioca served the same purpose here that Italian pastina or royale custard did: it gave a clear broth a little body and something for the spoon to find, without muddying it.