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Consomme, Piedmontaise
Prepare a consomme, strain it through a cheesecloth into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Cut one onion, one seedless green pepper and two ounces raw lean ham into small square pieces. Place these articles in a small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes, stirring meanwhile; add two ounces good Italian rice, moisten with a gill tomato sauce, two gills consomme and season with three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon saffron in powder. Mix well, cover pan, set in oven for thirty minutes, remove and add to consomme. Cut one country sausage in very thin slices and also add to consomme, boil for eight minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve with a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear soup finished with a small pan of saffron rice pilaf and sliced sausage. The rice is cooked separately and stirred in at the end, which keeps the consommé from clouding — that is the point of the method.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the rice takes 1/2 cup tomato sauce and 1 cup consommé. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: 3/4 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp cayenne, a scant 1/8 tsp powdered saffron.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in two ounces of rice is aggressive by current palates and will carry through to the whole tureen. Halve it unless you want the soup frankly hot.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A covered pan of rice of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated thirty minutes; check at twenty-five, as two ounces of rice is a very small quantity to bake.
- Italian riceA short-grain Italian rice; today arborio, carnaroli or vialone nano stand in, though these are modern varieties and not what the book itself would have had. Two ounces is a scant third of a cup dry, which swells to roughly a cup cooked, the right amount of garnish for a tureen of soup.
- Seedless green pepperNot a variety. It means a green bell pepper with the seeds and white ribs cut out.
- Country sausageA fresh, uncured breakfast-style pork sausage. Sliced very thin it will cook through in the eight minutes of boiling, but confirm it is no longer pink at the centre before the tureen goes to table; thicker coins will not.
- Keeping the consommé clearAdd the rice and sausage to gently boiling, not violently boiling, stock, and skim any fat the sausage throws off. Hard boiling breaks starch out of the rice and turns a clear soup cloudy.
- YieldAssume about six cups of finished consommé, serving four to six as a first course. Pass the Parmesan separately as directed — stirred in, it clouds and strings.
In the classical French repertoire a consommé is named for its garnish, and the garnish is a shorthand for a place: à la Piedmontaise means rice, because Piedmont is where Italy grows it. The flooded paddies around Vercelli and Novara have supplied northern Italian kitchens since the late Middle Ages, and by the nineteenth century "Piedmontese" on a French menu generally pointed to rice, usually with white truffle. Saffron, where it appears in such dishes, nods toward Milanese risotto rather than anything strictly Piedmontese, which is typical of the loose geography of hotel-dining-room nomenclature. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in that tradition — hundreds of consommés distinguished only by what is dropped into them, a system that one imagines would let a large kitchen send out a dozen differently named soups from a single morning's stock.