No. 191

Clarified Fish Consomme

Consomme de Poisson Clarifie

Butter the bottom of a saucepan, garnishing it with sliced onions, and place on top six pounds of fish bones, such as bass, perch or any other gelatinous fish, a bunch of celery, parsley, bay leaf, thyme, one pound of minced carrots, a pound and a half of leeks, and dilute with one quart of water. Cover the saucepan, set it over a slow fire, and let fall to a colorless glaze, then moisten with four quarts of hot water, boil, skim and let simmer for one hour, then strain through a sieve, and clarify the broth with the whites of four eggs and half a bottleful of white wine.

← No. 190 Clarified Chicken Consomme Soups & Broths No. 192 Clarified Game Consomme →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows what a glaze and a clarification look like, so the two steps that carry the whole dish are given in a handful of words. Read the notes on those before starting.

"Fall to a colorless glaze"This is the hinge. The bones and vegetables are sweated in one quart of water over low heat until that liquid has cooked away to a sticky film on the pan bottom, with no browning at all. If the pan takes any color the finished consomme will be cloudy and dark instead of pale amber.
Simmering timeAn hour is far longer than modern practice for fish bones. Thirty minutes extracts the gelatin and flavor; beyond that the bones tend to give up bitterness and a glue-like heaviness. The recipe's hour should be treated as a maximum rather than a target.
Which bones"Gelatinous fish" means lean white fish -- bass, perch, sole, turbot, halibut, whiting. Avoid salmon, mackerel, bluefish and any oily fish, whose fat cannot be clarified out. Cut away gills and any dark blood along the spine, and rinse the frames well; both cloud the broth and turn it bitter.
Half a bottleful of wineBottle sizes were not standardised in the nineteenth century, but were broadly comparable to the modern 750 ml (about 25 fl oz), so read this as roughly 1 1/2 cups of dry white wine. Add it cold, with the beaten egg whites, to broth that has been cooled to lukewarm.
The clarificationWhisk the four egg whites into the cool strained broth, then bring it up slowly, stirring until it is hot to the touch, and stop stirring the moment the raft begins to knit. Hold at the barest tremble for 20 to 30 minutes, then ladle -- do not pour -- through a sieve lined with damp cheesecloth.
Slow fireBoth the initial sweat and the clarification want the lowest steady heat your burner will hold. A diffuser or a heavy-bottomed pot is worth using; a fast boil breaks the raft and drives fat back into the liquid.
SeasoningNo salt appears anywhere in the recipe. Season the strained broth at the end, once the reduction is known.
YieldFour quarts of water in, about three quarts of clear consomme out after skimming, straining and clarifying -- roughly twelve first-course servings. Scaled by a quarter it still works, though very small clarifications are harder to control.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized like a professional kitchen's reference rather than a home cookbook: consommes are numbered in sequence -- chicken (No. 190), fish (No. 191), game (No. 192) -- each serving as a base from which other finished soups were built. A fish consomme suited the fish courses of long formal dinners, and the fast days of the church calendar, where a meat broth would have been out of place; a similar clear liquid, reduced further or set with additional gelatin, could also serve as aspic. The technique itself is older than the book: clarifying broth with egg white, which coagulates and traps suspended particles as it rises, is described in European cookery well before the nineteenth century, and the addition of white wine with the whites is consistent with the French practice of using a little acid alongside the clarification.