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Consomme with Lettuce
Prepare a consomme, strain into another saucepan and keep simmering until required. Finely chop two ounces of raw, lean veal, place it in the mortar with an egg yolk, three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne, half saltspoon grated nutmeg and half teaspoon chopped parsley. Pound to a smooth paste, then place in a bowl and add two tablespoons cream, sharply stirring with spoon while adding.
Remove the green leaves from two heads of lettuce (keeping the white parts for salad), thoroughly wash the leaves in cold water, take them up and plunge them in a quart boiling water and boil for three minutes. Take up with skimmer and drain on a cloth, spread force evenly over the leaves, roll them up, place on a lightly buttered sautoire, season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, moisten with half pint consomme, cover with sheet of buttered paper, set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, take up, neatly trim off the ends of each, cut in quarter-inch pieces, place in soup tureen, pour the consomme over and serve.
A clear soup built around little veal-stuffed lettuce rolls, in the classical French manner where the garnish names the soup. The work is all in the forcemeat and the rolling; the consommé itself must stay perfectly clear.
- The hinge: keep the consommé clearOnce strained, hold it at a bare simmer with no lid rattling and never let it boil hard, or the last suspended solids break up and cloud it. Add the sliced rolls to the tureen and pour the hot consommé over at the moment of serving, so nothing has time to shed starch or fat into it.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, one saltspoon cayenne is 1/4 teaspoon, half a saltspoon nutmeg is 1/8 teaspoon. The cayenne is assertive for two ounces of veal; a scant 1/8 teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, not a deep casserole. Any wide sauté pan or small roasting pan that holds the rolls in a single layer will do, since the half pint of consommé is meant to come partway up them, not cover them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date for ranges that were rarely calibrated. A moderate oven, around 350F, works: ten minutes at that heat, under buttered paper, is enough to set a thin layer of forcemeat rolled in leaves. If your rolls are fat, give them fifteen and check that the center of the veal has firmed.
- The forcemeat without a mortarA food processor does in thirty seconds what pounding did in ten minutes. Chill the veal well, pulse it with the yolk and seasonings to a smooth paste, then add the cream with the machine running. Cold ingredients and a short mix keep the emulsion from breaking.
- Blanching the leavesThree minutes in boiling water is right for the tough outer leaves of a firm head, which is what this recipe uses; they need to be pliable enough to roll without splitting. Drain them flat on a towel and pat dry, since water left in the leaves will dilute the consommé.
- Which lettuce"Two heads of lettuce" here implies something with substantial green outer leaves and a pale heart worth saving for salad; romaine or a large butterhead suit well. Loose-leaf types have too little strength in the leaf to roll.
- YieldTwo ounces of veal and the leaves of two heads will stretch to about four servings of garnish, though the recipe says nothing about numbers. Figuring a cup of consomme per person, that is roughly a quart plus the half pint used for braising.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had been a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book carries the vocabulary of a professional French kitchen into a domestic one, sautoire and mortar and all. Clear soups in that tradition were classified almost entirely by their garnish, which is why the title tells you nothing about the consommé itself and everything about the lettuce rolls floating in it. Stuffing and rolling blanched greens around a pounded meat forcemeat was a standard exercise of the period, close kin to the braised stuffed lettuce served as a vegetable course; the same paste, poached in a different shape, becomes a quenelle. The instruction to keep the white hearts for salad is a small piece of professional thrift, the sort of note that marks a book written by someone used to accounting for every part of what he bought.