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Consomme, Neapolitan
Prepare and strain a consomme into a saucepan and keep simmering. In another saucepan plunge four ounces macaroni in a quart boiling water with teaspoon salt, boil thirty-five minutes, drain, then plunge in cold water. Finely chop two ounces raw veal, then pound in a mortar; add one egg yolk, two saltspoons salt, a half saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg and two tablespoons cream; pound until well amalgamated and place in a paper cornet. Drain the macaroni, and cut in half-inch pieces. Break off a small piece of cornet at the point, then press force into interior of the macaroni and plunge in boiling water for three minutes. Drain and add the macaroni to the consomme, boil for two minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A clear soup garnished with short lengths of macaroni piped full of veal forcemeat. The work is all in the garnish; the consommé itself must simply stay clear.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the forcemeat takes 1/2 teaspoon salt and a scant 1/8 teaspoon each of cayenne and grated nutmeg.
- Choose a wide tube"Macaroni" in period usage meant a long, fairly thick hollow tube, closer to today's bucatini or ziti than to elbow macaroni. Buy the widest straight tube you can find, or the piping step is impossible.
- Thirty-five minutes is far too longThat timing belongs to the coarse, slow-drying pasta of the period. Modern dried tubes need 8-12 minutes; cook them a minute short of al dente so they hold their shape when filled and simmered again.
- The cold water is not optionalShocking the pasta stops the cooking and makes the tubes firm enough to handle. Drain them well and blot before piping, or the forcemeat will slide back out.
- Paper cornetA cone rolled from parchment with the tip snipped off — a disposable piping bag. A small piping bag with a plain 1/4-inch tip does the same job more easily.
- Pounding the vealA mortar was the standard tool for a smooth farce in a period kitchen, though sieves and hand mincers were also used. A food processor gets there in seconds: grind the veal cold, then add yolk, seasoning and cream and pulse just until it is a smooth, pipeable paste. Keep everything chilled so the cream does not break.
- Protect the clarityA consommé that boils hard goes cloudy and the labour of clarifying it is wasted. Hold it at a bare shiver, and read the final "boil for two minutes" as two minutes at a simmer, long enough to heat the garnish through.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much consommé to prepare; four ounces of macaroni and two ounces of veal will garnish roughly six cups, or about four to six first-course servings. Divide the filled tubes among the bowls so each gets an equal share.
Nineteenth-century French kitchen practice classified consommés by their garnish, and the resulting list of names — Célestine, Julienne, Brunoise, Neapolitan — filled pages of professional manuals; the shorthand assumed any cook knew that the title alone specified the garnish. "Neapolitan" here signals macaroni, Naples being traditionally associated with pasta, and the word "macaroni" being, in English usage of the period, a general term for tubular dried pasta rather than the elbow shape it later came to mean. Stuffing short lengths of tube with a pounded forcemeat is a classic garnish trick of the same school: it turns a cheap starch into something that reads as fine work, and it uses two ounces of veal to dress a whole tureen.