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Consomme, Adelina
Prepare a consomme, strain through a cheesecloth into another saucepan and set on the fire. Gradually dredge in two ounces tapioca, sharply mixing while adding it, then let boil for fifteen minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile. Dilute one egg yolk in a half gill cream, add it to the consomme, sharply mixing while adding, heat for two minutes longer, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear soup thickened twice over — first with tapioca, then with a yolk-and-cream liaison. The recipe assumes you already have consommé on hand and never says how much; the tapioca quantity points to roughly two quarts.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolk goes inOnce the yolk and cream are stirred in, the soup must stay below a simmer. Two minutes at around 180F is enough to thicken it; a boil scrambles the yolk and leaves grainy flecks suspended in what should be a glossy, faintly opaque broth.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz) in American measure, so half a gill of cream is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup or four tablespoons. (British gills ran to 5 fl oz, which would make it a shade more.) Use heavy cream — it tempers the yolk and resists breaking better than light cream or half-and-half.
- Quantity of consomméUnstated. Two ounces of tapioca will thicken about two quarts to a light body; less liquid and you move toward pudding. Scale accordingly if you are working from a smaller batch.
- Which tapiocaPeriod recipes of this kind mean small pearl or granulated tapioca, not the large boba pearls sold today and not instant. Large pearls will not soften in fifteen minutes; instant will dissolve to slime almost at once.
- Dredging inTo dredge here is to sprinkle the tapioca slowly over the surface of moving liquid, not to dump it in. Adding it in a stream while whisking is the same idea and prevents the grains clumping into a mass on the bottom.
- Tempering the liaisonThe original adds the yolk-cream mixture straight to the hot soup. Safer for texture is to whisk a ladle of hot consommé into the yolk first, then return the lot to the pan off direct heat.
- StrainingCheesecloth-lined sieve, or a fine chinois. This matters more than usual: the whole point of a consommé is clarity, and any matter carried through from the clarification will be visible in the finished soup.
- YieldAbout six to eight cups, serving six as a first course. Serve immediately — the tapioca continues to swell and the soup thickens noticeably on standing.
Naming a dish for a celebrated singer or actress was standard practice in the grand hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth century, and this consommé is generally taken to honour Adelina Patti, the Spanish-born Italian soprano who dominated European opera houses from the 1860s until her retirement, and whose name attached itself to a considerable number of restaurant dishes. Whether Patti ever ate it is another matter; the convention was flattery, not authorship. What the recipe records is a very particular idea of refinement — a broth clarified until it is transparent, then deliberately veiled again with tapioca and a yolk liaison, the two operations cancelling each other in a way that only a kitchen with time and staff would bother with. Tapioca, extracted from cassava and imported through the colonial trade, was by 1900 an unremarkable pantry staple in Europe and America, valued in soups precisely because it thickened without clouding as flour would.