No. 219

Consomme a la Bariatenski

Make a pancake preparation (No. 3072), without sugar, and with it cook some very thin pancakes; when done cut from them pieces one and five-eighth inches long, by one and a half wide; spread over each piece a layer of chicken forcemeat, mixed with chopped mushrooms and parsley and a little anchovy paste; roll them up and lay them on a buttered baking pan; then poach them in a slack oven; prepare some marrow quenelles (No. 252), roll them into balls, five-eighths of an inch in diameter, and poach them in boiling water; have also a pluche of chervil (No. 448). Serve the same as for a l'Adelina (No. 215), using chicken consomme.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a garnish recipe rather than a soup recipe: the consommé itself is made elsewhere in the book, and what follows here are the two things floating in it. Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so the page is only workable if you know what the numbers stand in for.

The cross-referencesNo. 3072 is Ranhofer's pancake batter, used here without sugar as the recipe directs. No. 252 is his marrow quenelle forcemeat; No. 448 is a pluche, meaning chervil leaves picked whole from their stems. No. 215, a l'Adelina, supplies the service method. The page is only workable if you look each of those numbers up, since none of the detail is repeated here.
Slack oven"slack" is generally taken to mean the low end of the range, roughly 250-300F, though Ranhofer gives no figures. The rolled pancakes are being poached on a buttered pan, not browned; if they colour, the oven is too hot.
Cook the forcemeat throughRaw chicken forcemeat inside a rolled crêpe insulates itself. Give the rolls long enough at low heat that the filling reaches 165F at the centre, and check one before serving the batch.
Marrow quenellesBeef marrow is a butcher order, not a supermarket item; ask for marrow bones and scoop the marrow, or for marrow already removed. Ranhofer says the five-eighths-inch balls are poached in boiling water, though water held just below a simmer is gentler on them.
The odd dimensionsOne and five-eighths by one and a half inches is simply a small rectangle, about 4 by 3.8 cm, that rolls into a small bite.
Anchovy pasteUse it sparingly, a scant quarter-teaspoon in a cup of forcemeat. It is easy to overdo, and the consomme behind it is delicate.
ChervilChervil is delicate and loses its anise note quickly with heat, which is why a pluche is added at service. If you cannot find it, flat parsley is a common substitute, but it is not the same thing.
YieldRanhofer gives none. Figure three rolled pancakes and four or five quenelles per portion, in about 1 1/4 cups of chicken consommé — the garnish should sit in the bowl, not fill it.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its consomme chapter runs to dozens of numbered variations that differ largely in what is dropped into the bowl. The naming follows French practice of the period: a clear soup was flattered onto a patron, a performer or a foreign notable, and Bariatenski appears to be a variant transliteration of Bariatinsky, one of the Russian princely families. Whether any particular Bariatinsky ever ate this is undocumented; the name signalled prestige more than provenance. The structure -- stuffed pancake rolls, marrow quenelles, a pluche of herbs -- is garnish-work in the Careme line, where the broth is a neutral, brilliantly clarified ground and the identity of the dish lives in the solids.