Home › The World's Kitchen › Game Consomme in Cups
Game Consomme in Cups
Cut head off a fat grouse, neatly draw and wipe well, place on a small roasting pan, spread a little butter over and set in oven to roast for twenty minutes. Remove from oven, cut grouse in very small pieces and place in a saucepan with a pound piece each knuckle of veal and shin of beef cut in small pieces, a sliced each carrot and onion, two leeks, two each branches celery and parsley, a branch chervil, sprig thyme, bay leaf, clove, blade of mace and saltspoon nutmeg. Pour in five quarts water, season with two teaspoons salt and half teaspoon freshly crushed black peppers, mix well and let slowly boil for three hours, being careful to skim off fat once in a while. Pour in a half gill sherry, boil for five minutes, then strain broth through a damp double cheesecloth into six cups and serve.
A game stock built on a roasted grouse, reinforced with veal knuckle and beef shin, then reduced hard and served straight from the cup. The whole point is clarity and depth, and both come from how you handle the pot in the first twenty minutes.
- Never let it boil hard"Slowly boil" here means a bare simmer with one lazy bubble breaking the surface. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and the albumin from the veal knuckle back into the liquid and no amount of straining will give you a clear cup afterward.
- Archaic measuresA half gill of sherry is 2 fl oz, about 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so the nutmeg is a small grating, not a spoonful. Five quarts is 20 cups of water going in against six cups served, so expect substantial reduction plus loss to skimming and the cheesecloth.
- The grouseWild grouse is not a supermarket item in the United States and is usually only available to hunters or through a specialist game dealer. Farmed pheasant, or a mix of pheasant and squab, is the usual substitute, though it will be milder than grouse; quail are milder still, and two would be lost in five quarts of water.
- Roasting the birdThe recipe gives no oven temperature; twenty minutes in a hot oven browns the skin and bones without cooking the meat to rags. That browning is the flavor base of the whole consomme, so do not skip it and do not lose the pan drippings; deglaze the roasting pan with a little water and add it to the pot.
- Skimming"Once in a while" understates it. Skim continuously for the first twenty minutes as the scum rises, then every half hour. Skimming late is skimming after the impurities have already dispersed.
- This is a broth, not a classical consommeThere is no egg-white raft here, only a double thickness of damp cheesecloth. It will come out amber and bright rather than glass-clear. If you want the mirror finish, clarify with beaten egg whites and lean ground beef after straining and before the sherry.
- The sherryFive minutes of boiling is to drive off the raw alcohol edge, not to reduce it. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso, not cream sherry, and add it at the very end as written; earlier and much of the aroma cooks away.
- Timing and yieldThree hours is enough for the veal knuckle to give up much of its gelatin; four does no harm. Six cups, served as written in cups as a first course. If you are not serving at once, chilling overnight lets you lift the solidified fat off the top, which is cleaner than skimming alone.
Serving clear soup in a handled cup rather than a plate was a mark of the lighter, faster dinner service that took hold in hotel and club dining rooms around the turn of the twentieth century: a consomme in cups could be drunk between courses without silverware and without slowing the table. Game consommes drew their character from the bird, the grouse supplying aroma while a pound each of veal knuckle and beef shin supplied body and gelatin. The aromatic list here, leeks, celery, chervil, thyme, bay, clove and mace, is standard French professional practice of the period, the blade of mace and single clove included. Grouse was the prestige game bird of the British shooting season.