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Consomme, Rivoli
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep it simmering. Place in a vessel two ounces flour, one and a half ounces grated Parmesan cheese and two eggs, thoroughly mix with whisk until thoroughly thickened. Prepare two small cornets with heavy paper, then pour the preparation in the cornets, cut off a small piece the thickness of a pencil at the point of the cornets, press the preparation into the consomme, let boil for five minutes, pour the consomme into a soup tureen and send to the table with a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear soup finished with a stiff cheese-and-egg batter piped straight into the hot broth, where it sets into short irregular strands. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the consommé is made.
- The hinge: barely simmering, never boilingDespite the instruction to "let boil for five minutes," a rolling boil will shred the batter and cloud the consommé you took trouble to clarify. Hold the broth at a bare tremble, pipe in the batter, and let the strands poach until firm, about three to five minutes.
- Quantities in weightTwo ounces of flour is about 1/2 cup (56 g); an ounce and a half of grated Parmesan is a generous 1/2 cup loosely packed (42 g). Two whole eggs bind them into a paste roughly the consistency of thick choux — stiff enough to hold a shape, loose enough to press through a small opening.
- CornetsA cornet is a cone rolled from parchment or stiff paper, the period equivalent of a disposable piping bag. A pastry bag with a plain 1/4-inch tip does the same job; the point is an opening about the thickness of a pencil, as the original says.
- How much consomméHow much consomme -- No volume or yield is given anywhere in the recipe. As a rough guide, this quantity of batter would garnish somewhere in the region of a quart to a quart and a half of consomme, i.e. a first course for a small table, but the figure is an estimate and not from the book.
- The consommé itselfThe recipe assumes you have already made and clarified a consommé elsewhere in the book. Any well-flavoured clear beef or chicken broth works, but it should be properly degreased — fat on the surface will cling to the batter strands and look untidy.
- Grated Parmesan at tableUse real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana, grated fine. Pre-grated tubs generally carry an anti-caking agent such as powdered cellulose or starch, which can cloud a clear soup.
- ServingPipe and poach immediately before serving. The strands soften and swell if they are left standing in hot broth, and the soup loses its clarity and bite.
This belongs to the large family of Italian soups garnished with a stiff egg-and-cheese paste pushed into hot broth — passatelli in Emilia-Romagna, forced through a perforated iron rather than a paper cone, and various gnocchetti and drop garnishes in the French repertoire. Named consommes were the professional cook's shorthand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the base broth was standard, and the garnish alone determined the name on the menu, so a kitchen could offer a dozen soups from one stockpot. "Rivoli" is one of a great many place- and battle-names attached to garnishes of this period — the 1797 battle of Rivoli and the Paris street named after it are both plausible sources — but no connection with the place is established for this particular garnish. Paper cornets, rolled fresh and cut to whatever gauge the job required, were standard kitchen equipment alongside reusable cloth pastry bags.