Home › Bouillons › Ingredients
Ingredients
Three pounds of beef, three pounds of veal, a chicken, a small slice of ham, one small slice of a small onion, two sprigs of parsley, half a teaspoonful of celery seed, three cloves, a dash of tabasco sauce, salt, a gallon of cold water, whites and shells of two eggs, and caramel for coloring. Let the beef, veal, chicken and ham boil slowly for five hours; add the vegetables, cloves and celery seed to cook the last hour, having first fried the onion in a little hot butter and then in it stick the cloves. Strain the bouillon into an earthen bowl, and let it remain over night in a cool place. Next day remove the fat from the top; take out the jelly, avoiding the settlings, and mix into it the beaten whites of the eggs with the shells. Boil quickly for half a minute; then place the kettle on the hearth, skim off carefully all the scum and whites of the eggs from the top, not stirring the bouillon itself. Pass this through the jelly bag, when it should be clear. The bouillon may then be put aside and reheated just before serving. Add, then, a tablespoonful of caramel as it gives it a richer color and also a slight flavor. Of course the brightest and cleanest of kettles should be used.
I once saw this transparent bouillon served in Paris, without color, but made quite thick with a little tapioca. It looked very clear and was exceedingly nice. .
This is a consommé in all but name: a long-simmered stock, chilled to a jelly, then clarified with egg white. Everything hinges on the clarification, and nothing else in the method is difficult.
- Do not stir the raftOnce the beaten whites and crushed shells go in, bring the pot up gently, let it boil hard for the half-minute the recipe specifies, then pull it off the heat and leave it alone. Stirring breaks the coagulated raft and drives the albumen back into the liquid, and the bouillon will never come clear.
- "Place the kettle on the hearth"Most likely the cooler edge of the range or the hearthstone beside the fire, off direct heat, so the pot stays hot while the raft and scum settle enough to be skimmed. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting, or a turned-off ring.
- Jelly bagA cone of flannel or several layers of unbleached muslin, wetted first so it does not absorb the broth. A fine chinois lined with damp cheesecloth does the same job. Let it drip; squeezing pushes fines through and clouds the result.
- A gallon of cold water16 cups, for roughly 6 lb of meat plus a whole chicken. Start cold and keep the simmer lazy throughout the five hours; a rolling boil emulsifies fat and protein into the liquid and makes the later clarification much harder.
- Caramel for coloringHome-made burnt sugar: sugar melted and taken well past amber, then let down with a little hot water and cooled. A commercial gravy browning such as Kitchen Bouquet will do the same job, though it carries its own seasoning.
- Overnight in a cool placeWritten for a cellar or a north-facing larder. Chill the strained stock quickly instead - set the bowl in an ice-water bath until it is cool, then refrigerate uncovered until set. A gallon of warm stock left standing in a modern kitchen sits in the bacterial danger zone for hours.
- Salt lateThe recipe lists salt among the ingredients without saying when it is added. A gallon reduces over five hours and again on reheating, so season lightly at the start and correct after clarification, when the volume is fixed.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly two to three quarts of finished bouillon, or about 8-12 cups served as a first course. The Paris version noted at the end means a little pearl tapioca simmered in the clear broth until translucent.
Clear bouillon was the prestige soup of the late nineteenth-century table, and the labor was the point: three kinds of meat plus a chicken reduced to a liquid you could read print through, colored with burnt sugar because a pale consommé looked thin. The technique itself - clarifying a chilled, degreased stock with egg white and shell - was standard French professional practice codified in the grande cuisine of the period, and American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carried it over largely intact for hostesses who kept a cook. Two small details date the page precisely: the dash of Tabasco, a Louisiana product then only a few decades old and newly fashionable as a general seasoning, and the first-person aside about a soup seen in Paris, which is how these compilations often absorbed material - as remembered restaurant dishes passed along in print. The book files it under bouillons rather than consommés, reflecting a looser American usage in which bouillon meant any clear meat broth served in a cup.