No. 230

Consomme a la Duchess

Consomme a la Duchesse

The garnishing for this consomme is composed as follows: prepare some bread-crumb croutons half an inch thick by five-eighths in length, slit them with the tip of a small knife at one-eighth of an inch from the edge all around; stand them on a baking sheet, pour over some melted butter and brown in a hot oven, remove, lift off the covers, scoop out the inside crumbs. Fry a little finely chopped onion in butter, dilute with some bechamel and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg; add the same amount of finely chopped lobster meat, thicken with egg-yolks, cream, and a little nutmeg; with this preparation fill the crusts, cover the tops with quenelle forcemeat finished with lobster butter and poach in a slack oven, then dress. Serve some consomme in a separate soup tureen containing rice, blanched and cooked in consomme, and small green peas, cooked English style (No. 2742). The croustades to be served separately at the same time as the consomme.

← No. 229 Consomme a la Dubarry Soups & Broths No. 231 Consomme a l'Imperatrice →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have consomme, bechamel, quenelle forcemeat and lobster butter already standing in the kitchen; the recipe itself is really an assembly of small stuffed bread cases served alongside a garnished clear soup.

The hingeFill the croustades just before poaching. A lobster bechamel bound with egg yolk and cream will soak into the buttered crumb if it is left standing.
Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" for browning the buttered croutons is conventionally reckoned at about 425-450F, and it takes only a few minutes. A "slack oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 250-300F, low enough that the egg-and-cream binding sets without curdling and the forcemeat lid holds its shape.
Cutting the casesHalf an inch thick by five-eighths of an inch is a very small crouton. The slit made an eighth of an inch inside the edge is the cut that frees a lid, as with a vol-au-vent; use a paring knife tip and do not cut all the way through.
Bread"Bread-crumb" here means the crumb of the loaf, i.e. the soft interior, not dried crumbs. Use a close-textured white pullman loaf a day old; modern airy sandwich bread will tear rather than hold a hollow.
Quenelle forcemeat and lobster butterBoth are separate recipes in The Epicurean. Forcemeat is a pounded raw fish or veal paste with panada and cream, workable in a food processor; lobster butter is butter creamed with pounded lobster shells and coral, then strained. A compound butter of shell-infused butter with a little tomato paste is one workable substitute.
Peas cooked English styleRanhofer refers this to No. 2742; the term generally means peas boiled in well-salted water and drained. Two minutes for frozen petits pois. They go into the tureen at the last moment.
RiceBlanch the rice briefly in water first to remove surface starch, then finish it in consomme so the broth stays clear. Cooking raw rice directly in the consomme clouds it, which defeats the point of a consomme.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; two croustades per person and about six ounces of consomme is a reasonable working estimate. The soup goes to table in its tureen, the croustades on a separate dish at the same moment, and both must be genuinely hot.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in print, which is why this entry cross-references other numbered recipes rather than explaining itself. The long run of consommes it belongs to reflects the French service of the period, when a clear soup opened the meal and was distinguished less by its broth than by its garnish, each variation carrying a name from the court or the aristocracy: Dubarry, Imperatrice, Duchesse. The "a la duchesse" tag was applied loosely across nineteenth-century French cooking and generally signals a rich, refined garnish rather than any single fixed formula. Here Ranhofer serves the garnish apart, on its own dish, since a fried case sunk in hot broth for the length of a course would be sodden by the time it reached the diner.