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Potage, Long
Prepare, strain and keep hot a consomme.
Heat one tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add one chopped white onion and one seeded, chopped green pepper, and fry both six minutes, stirring once in a while; then add four ounces raw rice, cook five minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a pint of the consomme, add four chicken livers freed from the gall bags and cut in four pieces each, and two medium peeled tomatoes cut in eight pieces each. Season with half teaspoon curry powder, half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper, gently mix, cover pan, then set in oven forty minutes. Remove, add to the prepared consomme, let boil five minutes, pour potage into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A curried rice-and-liver garnish baked separately, then stirred into clear consommé at the last moment. The original assumes you already have a good stock on hand and never says how much.
- How much consomméA pint goes into the baking pan; the rest is the soup itself. Figure on 2 to 2 1/2 quarts total for six to eight servings.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne across two quarts of soup is assertive but not punishing.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature, as was usual for recipes of this date. Covered, a moderate oven of about 350F for forty minutes should do it; check at thirty in case the rice has drunk all the liquid and needs another splash of stock.
- Rice by weightFour ounces of raw long-grain rice is a little over half a cup. It roughly triples in the pan, so the baked mixture should come out moist and loose, not a solid cake.
- Gall bagsLivers sold today are already trimmed, but look for any green-stained patch and cut it away -- bile is intensely bitter and will spoil the whole tureen.
- What the livers will be likeForty covered minutes leaves them fully cooked and crumbly rather than pink and creamy. That is the intended texture here; they are a garnish that thickens the soup slightly, not a seared liver course.
- Green pepperAn ordinary green bell pepper. Seed it and take out the white ribs as well, which turn bitter with long cooking.
- The final boilFive minutes is enough to marry the two parts. Longer and the rice grains break down and the consommé loses the clarity that was the point of straining it.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and like much of his work it is organized as a professional's reference: hundreds of soups listed by name, each a variation on a handful of mother preparations. Many of those names are surnames rather than descriptions, and "Long" may well be one of them, though the individual behind any given dish is rarely recoverable. The dish itself sits in a recognizable family: consomme plus a rice garnish is the potage a la pattern, and the curry powder, tomato and chicken liver point toward the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny that had been appearing in English and American cookbooks since the early nineteenth century. Baking the garnish covered in the oven, rather than simmering it in the soup, keeps the consomme clear -- a distinction that mattered to a kitchen judged on the transparency of its broth.