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Consomme, Rachel
Prepare, strain into another saucepan and keep hot a consomme. Cut the tender part of a bunch fresh asparagus in half-inch pieces, thoroughly wash and drain, plunge into a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for twenty minutes, drain on a sieve and add to consomme. Prepare some chicken quenelles, drain and add also to the consomme, boil for three minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnished clear soup that assumes you already have consommé and quenelle forcemeat on hand — this is an assembly recipe, and the only real cooking is the asparagus and the poaching of the dumplings.
- The hinge: keep it clearEverything is cooked separately and added at the last minute so the consommé stays limpid. Boiling asparagus or raw forcemeat in the broth itself clouds it with starch and albumen, which is exactly what the two-stage method avoids.
- Asparagus timingTwenty minutes will reduce half-inch tips to fibre and grey-green mush. Salted boiling water for two to four minutes, depending on thickness, then drain — the pieces should still have some resistance.
- QuenellesChicken quenelles are a forcemeat of raw breast pounded with egg white and cream, shaped in two spoons and poached in barely simmering salted water or stock until they float and feel firm, roughly six to eight minutes for small ones. A food processor does the pounding. Poach them separately, not in the consommé.
- "Boil for three minutes"Read this as a bare simmer to bring the garnishes up to serving heat. A hard boil breaks quenelles apart and muddies the broth.
- QuantitiesThe original gives no volume of consommé. For a bunch of asparagus and a modest batch of quenelles, figure about 6 cups of consommé serving six as a first course, at 1 cup per person with a few pieces of asparagus and two or three quenelles.
- Straining"Strain into another saucepan" means through a cloth or several layers of muslin, not a colander. Do not press the solids through; let it drip.
- Seasoning at the endConsommé that has been clarified and held hot concentrates as it stands. Taste for salt after the garnishes go in, since the asparagus water and poaching liquid dilute nothing but the dumplings carry their own seasoning.
Nineteenth-century French kitchens gave clear soups proper names according to their garnish, so that a written menu told a cook exactly what to put in the tureen: Consommé Célestine meant shredded pancake, Brunoise meant finely diced vegetables, and Rachel is generally associated with quenelles and asparagus tips. The name is usually traced to the tragic actress Élisa Rachel Félix, hugely famous in Paris in the 1840s and 50s and one of a number of performers — Patti, Bernhardt, Melba — after whom restaurant dishes were christened, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The recipe's shape, presuming a stockpot of finished consommé and a bowl of forcemeat already prepared, is a professional one: it belongs to a book compiled when the ambitious home cook was expected to work through the classical repertoire garnish by garnish.