No. 221

Consomme a la Britannia

Put on to boil three quarts of fish consomme, or chicken if needed for fat; thicken it with three spoonfuls of arrowroot diluted with cold broth, and remove it to one side. Pound the meat from a cooked lobster by breaking the shells and removing about three-quarters of a pound of its meat, and add to it half a pint of veloute (No. 415). Season and strain through a fine sieve, mix this with some chicken and cream forcemeat (No. 75), divide it into two parts, and color one of them delicate red; butter some long eight inch molds, by one and one-eighth square; fill half of each so as to form a triangle with the white forcemeat and the other half with the red, place the molds in a sautoire with water to half their height and poach them in a slack oven, then cut them in slices, a quarter of an inch wide. Have some asparagus tops, and serve the garnishing in a vegetable dish with a little consomme added, and a soup tureen of consomme separate.

← No. 220 Consomme a la Berry Soups & Broths No. 222 Consomme Careme, Lean or Fat →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classical garnished consommé from Delmonico's kitchen: the soup itself is simple, and nearly all the work is in the two-tone lobster and chicken custard that is poached, sliced and floated in it. Read the cross-referenced numbers as a warning — this dish assumes a velouté and a chicken-and-cream forcemeat already made.

The hinge: arrowrootArrowroot sets on first coming to the boil and then thins again if held at a hard boil or reheated repeatedly. Whisk the slurry into the consommé, bring it just to a simmer until it clears and lightly bodies, then move it off the heat as Ranhofer says. Three spoonfuls (read as tablespoons) in three quarts gives a barely perceptible body, not a sauce.
Slack oven'Slack oven' is a period term for a cool oven, generally taken to be somewhere in the region of 250-300F. The molds sit in a water bath filled halfway up their sides; the custard is done when set to the touch and the centre reads about 160F, perhaps 30-40 minutes depending on the mold. Anything hotter and the forcemeat curdles and weeps.
The moldsEight inches long by one and one-eighth square are long narrow bar molds, essentially miniature terrines, made to be sliced crosswise into small squares. Small loaf or pâté molds, or a foil-lined mini loaf pan, will do; the point is a uniform cross-section so every slice shows the same red-and-white triangle.
Building the two coloursButter the mold, spread the white forcemeat down one side along a diagonal, then fill the remaining wedge with the red so the finished cross-section is two triangles. Chill the first half briefly before adding the second and the line stays sharp.
Colouring the red halfLobster coral pounded in is the likeliest route and reinforces the flavour; prepared red colourings such as cochineal were also in use in kitchens of the period. A drop of food colouring gives the tint without it.
Lobster quantityThree-quarters of a pound of picked meat is a good deal: picked meat runs to roughly a quarter of live weight, so reckon on two lobsters of about 1 1/2 lb each, or one very large one. Save the shells for the fish consommé if you are making that from scratch.
Velouté and forcemeatNo. 415 is Ranhofer's velouté sauce — a white roux moistened with white stock, cooked out and strained. No. 75 is a cream forcemeat of pounded raw chicken and cream; a modern food processor does in two minutes what the mortar did in twenty.
The asparagusAsparagus tips should be blanched separately in salted water and kept bright green; they go into the garnish dish, not into the pot of consommé, or they grey.
Yield and serviceThree quarts serves about ten to twelve as a first course. The service is the old-fashioned split: garnish passed in one dish, clear soup in the tureen, assembled at the table or by the server.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its consommé chapter is a catalogue of the classical French system in which the broth barely varies while the garnish supplies the name. A consommé à la Britannia, like the dozens of others around it, is defined entirely by what floats in it — here a moulded, sliced forcemeat in two colours, a technique closer to the royale custards of the same repertoire than to anything a home cook would attempt. The red-and-white geometry and the British name suggest a garnish built to flatter a particular table or occasion, which was ordinary practice at Delmonico's; Ranhofer named dishes for patrons, cities and states as the situation required. The dish also shows how thoroughly the restaurant kitchen was organised around cross-reference: the recipe is unmakeable without turning to the velouté at No. 415 and the chicken-and-cream forcemeat at No. 75.