No. 189

Clarified Consomme

Consomme Clarifie

Proportions.—When the stock (No. 194a) is ready put five quarts of it into a soup pot, adding two pounds of lean meat and three pounds of cleansed and washed fowls. Boil it up slowly, and just when ready to come to a boil, carefully remove the scum arising on the surface and then add half a pound of roasted veal. Simmer slowly until the fowl is cooked, which will take from two and a half to three hours, lifting it out as soon as it is done so as to save the breasts which will be found useful for garnishings, purees, salads, sandwiches, etc.; return what remains of the fowls to the broth once again and continue boiling for half an hour longer, skim the fat off very carefully and mix in the clarification.

Clarification.—Trim off the fat, remove the nerves from a piece of beef sufficient to obtain two pounds after it is chopped up, and mix in with this chopped meat half a quart of cold stock (or water); pour this clarification into the broth, add two ounces of minced carrots, and two ounces of minced leeks; season with salt and color the soup with caramel (No. 18); keep the liquid in a boiling state for one hour. The consomme should be perfectly clear, sapid and tasty; strain it through a silk sieve or a fine napkin and use when needed, serve in cups, or in a soup tureen with any garnishing desired.

Remoistening.—After the stock or consomme has been taken out of the pot, pour in sufficient water to have the meats entirely re-covered and boil again for three hours; remove all the fat and strain it through a napkin; do not salt this. This remoistening is used for diluting certain soups, and to moisten veal or chicken stock with which meat extract is made (see meat extract, No. 368).

← No. 188 White Chicken Bouillon or Broth Soups & Broths No. 190 Clarified Chicken Consomme →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's consommé is a stock enriched a second time with fresh meat, then cleared with chopped beef rather than egg white. Everything hangs on how gently the pot is kept once the clarification goes in.

The hinge: no rolling boilThe original says to keep the liquid "in a boiling state for one hour." Modern practice is to hold a clarification at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil: a true boil breaks the raft of coagulated meat apart and drives the fine particles back into suspension, and no amount of straining will fix it afterwards.
ScaleFive quarts of stock plus five and a half pounds of meat and poultry is restaurant volume, yielding roughly four quarts of finished consommé, about 16 cups. Quarter it and the method is unchanged: about 5 cups stock, 8 oz lean beef, 12 oz fowl, 2 oz roast veal, 8 oz chopped beef for the clarification.
"Fowls"Not broilers. A fowl is a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful, which is why it can take two and a half to three hours. A supermarket stewing hen works; a young chicken will fall apart in half that time, so start checking at 75 minutes.
The clarificationTwo pounds of lean beef, ground or finely chopped, slaked with half a quart of cold stock so it goes into the hot liquid cold and disperses before it sets. Many modern recipes add egg whites along with the meat; Ranhofer relies on meat protein alone, which clears more slowly.
Caramel colourHis No. 18 is a caramel, used as colouring only. A few drops is all a gallon needs; more turns the consommé bitter.
StrainingA silk sieve or a fine napkin; the usual modern substitute is a doubled square of undyed cotton, rinsed with hot water first so it does not absorb fat and flavour. Ladle rather than pour, and leave the last inch of sediment in the pot.
FatHe skims twice and means it. Chilling the finished consommé overnight and lifting the solid fat off the top is easier and more thorough than skimming hot, and reheating gently does no harm.
RemoisteningThe remouillage is a second, weaker extraction from the spent meat and bones, deliberately left unsalted so it can be reduced later without going salty. Treat it as a substitute for water anywhere a recipe calls for thinning a soup or starting a sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for most of the years between 1862 and 1896, and The Epicurean (1894) is his working compendium of that operation, cross-referenced by number the way a professional kitchen actually uses recipes. Consommé — from the French for "completed" or "consummated," as the derivation is conventionally given — is stock taken to its logical end: clarified until it is bright enough to read print through, then judged on flavour alone, since there is nothing left to hide behind. The meat clarification here is the older classical method, of the kind laid out in Carême, in which raw lean beef and aromatics are worked into the cold-slaked liquid and rise as a raft that filters the broth as it sets. Two details mark this as restaurant rather than domestic writing: the instruction to lift the fowl early and save its breasts for garnishes and sandwiches, and the remouillage at the end, both of which exist to make a costly pot of meat earn its keep three times over.