No. 190

Clarified Chicken Consomme

Consomme de Volaille Clarifie

Put into a soup pot eight quarts of white chicken broth (No. 188), add two pounds of knuckle of veal, one pound of chicken legs and pinions, then boil, skim, and put in four pounds of roasted, unbrowned chicken, two minced leeks, one medium sized minced carrot, one onion stuck with one clove, a little parsley and celery roots. Boil continually for four hours. Chop up very fine two pounds of veal, mix in with it two whole eggs, dilute with one quart of cold broth and stir this into the consomme, using a whip, adding two broken up chicken carcasses. Boil on a slow fire for one hour, salt it according to taste, and strain it through a silk sieve.

← No. 189 Clarified Consomme Soups & Broths No. 191 Clarified Fish Consomme →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is restaurant-scale work: eight quarts of broth reduced and clarified with a veal-and-egg raft, in the manner of a Delmonico's kitchen with a coal range and a brigade. It scales down to a quarter without trouble, and the technique is unchanged.

Scale it downEight quarts of broth plus seven pounds of meat and bone (before the further two pounds of veal for the raft) will yield perhaps five or six quarts of finished consomme, enough for twenty or more servings, though the recipe gives no yield. Quartering everything — two quarts of broth, 8 oz veal knuckle, 1 lb roasted chicken, 8 oz veal for the raft, one egg — gives roughly a quart and a half.
"Roasted, unbrowned"The chicken is roasted only until cooked through and the juices set, with no color taken; Ranhofer gives no oven temperature. Browning would tint the consomme and coarsen the flavor; the point is pale gold clarity.
Pinions and knucklePinions are wing tips; ask a butcher or save them from other birds. Knuckle of veal is the joint end of the shank — sold today as veal shank or osso buco cuts, and worth having for the gelatin it gives the finished broth its body from.
The hinge: never let the raft boilThe hinge: keep the raft below a real boil -- Ranhofer says to boil on a slow fire, which in practice means holding the liquid at a bare tremble rather than rolling bubbles. A hard boil breaks the raft apart and drives the fine particles back into suspension, and no amount of straining afterward will recover the clarity.
Diluting with cold brothThe quart of cold broth is not optional padding. Adding the egg-and-veal mixture diluted and cold lets the proteins coagulate gradually and gather impurities as they rise; stirred straight into hard-boiling stock, the egg sets instantly into shreds.
Whole eggs, not just whitesRanhofer uses whole eggs; modern practice usually calls for whites alone, on the grounds that yolk fat can cloud the result. Whole eggs work, but skim the surface fat thoroughly before and after the raft forms.
Silk sieveA fine-mesh conical strainer lined with several layers of damp muslin or cheesecloth does the same job. Ladle rather than pour, and do not press the raft — the last murky inch is better sacrificed than pushed through.
Salt lastFive hours of reduction concentrates everything, which is exactly why the salt comes at the end. Season the strained consomme, not the pot.
Keeping itWell-clarified consomme sets to a soft jelly when chilled, a sign the veal knuckle did its work. It holds four days refrigerated and freezes cleanly; reheat gently so as not to cloud it.

A Little History

This is number 190 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled over the course of two spells as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Its position in the book is the point: No. 188 gives the plain white chicken broth, No. 189 the clarified consommé, No. 191 the fish version — a graded sequence in which each recipe assumes the one before it, exactly the way a French kitchen of the period taught its stocks. Clarification by raft, using chopped lean meat and egg to trap the particles that cloud a broth, was already old practice by Ranhofer's day and remains the standard method; what has changed is the arithmetic. Eight quarts of broth and seven pounds of meat for a single soup reflects a scale of cooking far beyond the domestic. The clear consommé itself was a mark of a serious kitchen, since only long, patient, unhurried heat produces it — a dish that advertised labor rather than ingredients.