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Consomme, Algerien
Prepare and strain a consomme into another pan, add three ounces tapioca, mix well and let boil fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while. Cut a medium, sound egg plant in half, peel one half and cut in small pieces (keeping the other half). Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, add the pieces of egg plant and fry ten minutes, tossing meanwhile. Sprinkle half teaspoon salt, toss a little, then drain on a cloth and add to the consomme; lightly mix, boil five minutes, pour soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear soup thickened with tapioca and garnished with fried eggplant. The original assumes you already have a pot of consommé on hand and never says how much, which is the first thing to settle.
- Quantity of consomméThe recipe gives no volume. Three ounces of tapioca is a great deal of starch: for a soup that stays pourable, work with at least 2 quarts (about 2 litres) of strained consommé, and expect a lightly bodied, slightly cloudy result rather than a crystalline one.
- Three ounces tapiocaThat is roughly 1/2 cup of small pearl tapioca by volume, not instant or minute tapioca, which behaves quite differently. Rain it in while the consommé is at a bare simmer and stir often; pearls sink and weld to the bottom of the pot.
- Fifteen minutes is rightSmall pearls need that long to go from opaque white to translucent with only a pinpoint of white at the centre. Undercooked tapioca is chalky and no amount of standing in the tureen will fix it.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or a blued steel pan, the ordinary heavy pan of the period, which takes and holds high heat. Eggplant absorbs fat fast, so one tablespoon of butter in a heavy pan means the pieces will brown by contact more than fry; add a little more fat if they look dry rather than reducing the heat.
- SaltingThe salt goes on after frying here rather than before; eggplant salted and left to sit weeps and can steam rather than brown. Modern eggplant is generally reckoned less bitter than older varieties, so a pre-salting and draining step is usually unnecessary.
- Draining on a clothPaper towel does the same job. Do this properly, or the butter the eggplant has soaked up will surface as a slick on a soup that is meant to look clean.
- The other halfThe recipe pointedly keeps half the eggplant back and never returns to it. Cut eggplant browns quickly; wrap and refrigerate it and use it within a day.
- YieldTwo quarts of finished soup serves six to eight as a first course. Serve promptly, since tapioca continues to swell and the soup thickens noticeably as it stands.
Consommés in the grand-hotel repertoire were named for their garnish, and the roll of names ran to hundreds: Célestine for shredded crêpes, Brunoise for diced vegetables, Algérien for something evoking French North Africa. Algeria was under French rule when this book was compiled, though quite how the name attached itself to this particular garnish is not recorded. Tapioca, milled from cassava root and imported through the colonial trade, was a fashionable thickener for clear soups in the late nineteenth century precisely because the pearls stayed distinct and translucent instead of clouding the broth the way flour would. The recipe's brevity is typical of the genre: it takes for granted that consommé is already made and simmering, and treats the dish as a garnish instruction rather than a soup from scratch.