No. 227

Consomme Cream of Pheasants or Game

Consomme Cremex de Faisans ou Gibier

Choose small, fresh pullet eggs; boil them for four minutes in boiling water, then lay them in water to cool off and remove the shells; open them on one end with a tube half an inch in diameter from a column-box (Fig. 168), take out the yolks with a root-spoon, and empty them very carefully, slightly decreasing the thickness of the white; then fill each egg separately; using a cornet for the purpose, with cream pheasant forcemeat (No. 75), or other game forcemeat, as soon as each one is done, close the opening with the piece taken off, and set each one in an egg cup. Arrange these on the bottom of a deep stewpan containing a little boiling water, close the vessel, and poach the forcemeat, by putting the pan for fifteen minutes in a slack oven; dress the egg in a vegetable dish with a little consomme added, and serve at the same time a soup tureen of game consomme.

← No. 226 Consomme Comus Soups & Broths No. 228 Consomme a la Daumont →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a soup so much as a garnish: hollowed soft-boiled eggs refilled with game forcemeat, served alongside a tureen of clear game consommé. Ranhofer assumes a brigade with specialist tools, but the whole thing can be done with a paring knife, a small spoon and a piping bag.

The hinge: four minutes and no moreThe eggs must be set just enough to peel and stand up, and no further. Boil them longer and the white turns rubbery and cracks when you cut the opening; the second cooking in the oven is what finishes them.
Pullet eggsEggs from a young hen, roughly 40-45 g against the 55-60 g of a modern large egg. Small or medium eggs are the closest substitute.
Column-box, root-spoon, cornetThe column-box was a set of round cutting tubes; a half-inch plain pastry tip does the same job of cutting a clean lid. A root-spoon is a small vegetable scoop, and a cornet is a paper piping cone. A quarter-teaspoon measure and a piping bag with a narrow plain tip replace all three.
Cream forcemeatRanhofer's No. 75 is broadly a cream forcemeat: pounded raw game flesh worked with egg white and cream and passed through a sieve — in modern terms a game mousseline. Roughly 250 g skinned pheasant or other lean game breast, blitzed cold with a small egg white and 150-200 ml cream, seasoned and passed through a sieve, fills about a dozen eggs. Keep everything refrigerator-cold or the cream will split.
A slack ovenAbout 250-275°F. The eggs sit in their cups above a little boiling water in a covered pan, so they are steaming rather than baking; the low heat is what keeps the forcemeat from swelling and bursting the whites.
Judging the poachFifteen minutes suits egg-sized quantities of mousseline. The filling should feel firm and springy at the opening cut in the white (the shells have already been peeled off); 165°F at the centre is the modern check for a poultry or game farce.
ServingOne egg per person, set in a warmed vegetable dish with a spoonful of consommé to keep them glossy, with the hot clear consommé passed separately. A dozen eggs and about two quarts of consommé serve twelve as a formal first course.
The consommé itselfThe recipe assumes you already have a clarified game stock on hand. Pheasant or grouse carcasses roasted and simmered with a light beef or veal stock, then clarified with lean minced game and egg white, give the clean amber broth the dish depends on.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for most of the last third of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that kitchen at full stretch — well over a thousand pages of French haute cuisine written for cooks who had staff to spare. Garnished consommés occupy dozens of numbered entries in it, each distinguished only by what floats in the cup: royales, quenelles, profiteroles, tiny stuffed vegetables. A filled egg of this kind belongs to the same tradition of trompe-l'oeil service that produced the stuffed-egg garnishes of Escoffier: the guest is handed something that looks exactly like a plain boiled egg and finds pheasant mousseline inside. Pheasant was a marker of the autumn and winter card in American hotel dining, sold through game dealers before the market-hunting trade was curtailed by state and federal law in the early twentieth century; farmed birds now fill the same slot, leaner and milder than what Ranhofer would have received.