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Consomme, with Rice
Prepare a consomme, strain it into another saucepan and keep hot. Boil in a quart of water with a teaspoon salt three ounces rice for thirty-five minutes. Drain on a sieve and add it to the consomme, then boil for five minutes. Pour it into a soup tureen and serve.
A garnished consommé, and the whole point is that the broth stays crystal clear. Everything below serves that.
- Cook the rice separately, and mean itThe rice is boiled in plain salted water and drained before it ever meets the broth. Starch shed into a clarified consommé turns it cloudy and undoes the clarification, so do not be tempted to simmer the grains directly in the soup.
- The timing is for older riceThe timing is long by modern standards -- Thirty-five minutes will reduce most modern long-grain rice to paste; today's white rice is done in 15-18 minutes. Aim for a firm, slightly underdone grain, since it gets five more minutes in the broth.
- Rinse before boilingThe recipe does not call for it, but a cold-water rinse until the water runs clear removes surface starch and keeps the grains separate.
- QuantitiesThree ounces of rice is a scant half cup dry, yielding roughly a cup and a half cooked. Note that the quart of water in the recipe is for boiling the rice; the recipe gives no quantity for the consomme itself.
- The consommé itselfThe book assumes you have made one elsewhere: a strong stock clarified with egg white and lean minced meat, then strained through a cloth. A good commercial beef or chicken broth, degreased and strained through muslin, is the practical substitute, though it will not have the same body.
- Strain and keep hotHold the strained broth just below a simmer while the rice cooks so it does not reduce or scorch. The recipe does call for a brief boil once the rice is added.
- ServingWarm the tureen and the bowls. A consommé is served very hot and thin, and a cold bowl drops it several degrees before it reaches the table.
Consommé — from the French for "completed" or "consummated," a stock cooked down and clarified to its finished state — was the backbone of formal service in the period this book comes from, and cookery writers catalogued it by garnish rather than by base. The broth was one recipe; consommé with rice, with pearl barley, with royale custard, with julienned vegetables, with tapioca were separate entries, each a line on a menu. That accounts for the terseness here: the reader was expected to have the mother recipe already, and this page is really an instruction about how to add a garnish without spoiling the clarity that hours of skimming and an egg-white raft had bought. The convention survives in the Escoffier-era names still seen occasionally on menus, where the garnish alone identifies the soup.