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Consomme, Ravioli
Strain a consomme into a hot soup tureen, add the ravioli and serve.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you have already made a clarified consomme and a batch of small meat-filled ravioli from earlier pages. What matters is how the two are brought together at the last moment.
- The hinge: cook the ravioli separatelyBoil or gently poach the ravioli in salted water, lift them out with a slotted spoon, and add them to the strained broth in the tureen. Cooking them in the consomme releases starch and flour and clouds a broth you have gone to trouble to clarify.
- Why it is strainedA consomme is clarified with egg white and lean meat, then poured through a cloth-lined sieve. Strain it directly into the heated tureen, not through the raft, and do not stir it afterwards.
- Ravioli sizeThe recipe does not specify a size. For soup, small rounds or squares of roughly 1 to 1.5 inches, thinly filled, sit best in a cup of clear broth; larger ravioli will swamp and cool it.
- Heat the tureenA cold china tureen will drop clear broth well below serving temperature. Fill it with boiling water, let it stand a few minutes, and empty it just before the consomme goes in.
- Broth temperatureBring the consomme just to the boil and take it off; sustained boiling turns a clarified broth cloudy and dulls its flavour.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Figure roughly 1 cup (8 oz) of consomme and 4 to 6 small ravioli per person as a first course.
- FinishingThe recipe specifies no garnish. Grated Parmesan passed at the table is usual with filled pasta in broth, though a clear consomme is more often served plain; a little chopped parsley or chervil is an alternative.
Filled pasta served in clear broth is one of the oldest surviving forms of Italian pasta cookery — ravioli in brodo and its relatives, tortellini and cappelletti, are documented in northern Italian kitchens for centuries, and the pairing with broth long predates the modern habit of serving stuffed pasta in sauce. What is characteristic of a cook book of this kind is the framing: the dish is filed under consomme, as a garnish for a clear soup, in keeping with the French service that governed formal menus. In that system a consomme was named for whatever floated in it — consomme royale, consomme julienne, consomme aux profiteroles — and consomme ravioli simply took its place in the list. The compression of the entry is also typical: readers were expected to work from the book's own recipes for consomme and for ravioli paste and filling, so the page needed only to say how the two met in the tureen.