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Consomme, Dubourg
Prepare a consomme, strain it into another saucepan and keep slowly boiling. Wash and drain two ounces raw rice, add to the consomme and boil for thirty-five minutes. Prepare a royale, cut in small square pieces and add to consomme with the leaves of two branches chervil, then let boil for two minutes, pour into a tureen and serve.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have a clarified consommé and a royale on hand, both made from separate entries elsewhere in the book. Almost all the work is in those two components.
- RoyaleA royale is a savoury baked custard — roughly beaten egg or egg yolk whisked with consommé or cream, seasoned, poured into a shallow buttered mould and set gently in a water bath in a low oven until just firm, then cooled, turned out and cut into small dice. It is a garnish, not a thickener, and it must be cold and fully set before it can be cut cleanly.
- Add the royale last, off the boilThis is the hinge. Diced custard disintegrates in a rolling boil; the two minutes here should be the barest simmer, just long enough to heat the dice through. Slide them in gently and do not stir hard.
- Rice timingThirty-five minutes is far longer than modern rice needs. Modern long-grain rice is soft in 15–18 minutes, and by 35 it will have burst and clouded a consommé you spent hours clarifying. Cook the rice separately in a little of the broth or in water, drain, and add it to the clear soup.
- Two ounces raw riceAbout 1/3 cup, which is a light hand — this is a garnished clear soup, not a rice soup. Expect the grains to be visible and separate in the bowl.
- Keeping it clearA consommé should be held below a simmer once strained. A true boil agitates the residual fine particles back into suspension and undoes the clarification.
- Chervil"The leaves of two branches" means the leaflets stripped from two sprigs — perhaps a tablespoon, loosely packed. Chervil is delicate and anise-scented; it is added at the end because heat destroys the aroma quickly. Flat-leaf parsley is the usual substitute, though it is not the same flavour.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantity of consommé, so the yield depends on how much broth you have made; two ounces of rice suits a soup for a small number of first-course servings. A warmed tureen matters more than it sounds: a clear soup in a cold vessel is tepid by the second ladle.
Consommés in the grand French repertoire were catalogued by their garnish, and the name after the comma is the whole identity of the dish — the broth itself is standard. Professional kitchens kept dozens of such names in play, and a book like this one reproduces them as a working list for cooks expected to produce a different clear soup each night. The royale is among the standard consommé garnishes, a set custard cut into shapes, valued because it adds substance to a soup without clouding it. The specific attribution here, like many in the classical lists, is generally taken to honour a patron or a chef, but the connection is not documented and by the time this book was printed the name had become simply a menu term meaning rice, diced royale and chervil.