"... a dish that betrays no trace of the food that was used to make it."
The quote above is from cooksinfo.com, a site that strangely sees this as a bad thing, believing that consommé is for snobs (the accent on the 'e' is the giveaway, although it is a French word that really couldn't help it). The theory is that during pre-revolutionary days the aristocracy had a habit of discarding perfectly edible food as the masses starved. This is most likely true but do not blame consommé. And "no trace of the food?" It is the very essence of the food that was used to make it. And even if you were starving, would you want to eat meat bones and vegetables sucked of all flavor? This "soup" is the very essence as well of refinement, of great cooking by civilized people who have come a long way from killing animals with spears and ripping their carcasses apart and eating the raw flesh. Cave men left a lot more food lying on the ground than your average French chef after making consommé.
As the world turns to hell, I think of consommé. To my mind it is the perfect antidote for dealing with what ails us. Its very existence, and that in one form or other dates back to the Middle Ages, is anathema to vegans, ethical or otherwise, which is appealing to me. The consommé I love is meat -- not chicken-based -- and the process of clarification is what makes it a different and far superior thing than mere soup. (Canned consommé has some merits, especially for Bullshots, aka hangover remedy, but it has too much sodium and a metallic taste that is off-putting unless disguised with a bunch of other ingredients.)
You will not see consommé in the vast array of fast-and-easy cookbooks unless it is an abomination of a recipe and bears little resemblance to the real deal. And very few if any people I know, many of them being competent and even great cooks, have ever made it. I serve it at dinner parties with a hint of good Spanish sherry and a sprig of chervil. Pure protein, no salt, no sugar, no fat. All flavour. The basis of the perfect diet -- small portions, good things like flavour and protein preserved, bad things omitted.
Besides how old-world and delicious consommé is, there are other more substantive reasons why I enjoy the ordeal of making it. It takes a long time. It's a cliché but unless you live off the grid, life is too fast and one never ends up feeling like you spend enough time doing any one thing. I like stuff that takes a long time. I am a book publisher and books are arduous and painstaking to write and publish, which is why they last so long and are enjoyed and contemplated more, say, than newspapers or magazines or most things posted on the Net.
Slow is good once in a while, perhaps now more than ever. I like my Blackberry for its quickness and how linked-in it makes me feel, but as my wife once said, it causes you to be nowhere because when on it, while in a meeting, simultaneously cradling your cell phone, you are truly in none of those places all at once. When you make consommé, you are there and nowhere else. I also like the process of taking something cloudy and making it clear, something impure and making it pure. Is this not the goal of everything we take our hands to unless you're an anarchist? The achievement of making consommé is about wringing the great out of the simply good, the exact opposite of communism, for example.
The following is the best I can do to describe how you make beef consommé. It starts with making white beef stock. The difference between dark and white beef stock is colour of course but also purity. The former involves roasting beef bones -- I like oxtail or veal in any beef stock I make -- with the usual vegetables you see in stock, like carrots, celery, and onion; and also with tomato paste, which is what is at the heart of its darkness, along with the roasting.
The latter is lighter but no less flavourful than when you boil the bones to remove a lot of the fat and impurities, dump the water, and then put in fresh water with the cleaned-off bones, vegetables, some bay leaf and thyme, and sometimes garlic and a few other spices. Everyone has a different recipe depending on taste. Eight hours of simmering (no boiling), filtering through a sieve with cheese cloth, cooling, skimming of fat the next day, and there you have it -- a beef stock that can be used in a lot of dishes, usually braises, soups, and sauces.
Or you can push the limits. That's the other thing I like about consommé: taking a perfectly good stock that you spent a day to make and risking it all by muddying it up and ending with something that is tacitly unappealing to all your senses. Pretty much everyone faces such decisions in their life: I have something pretty good. Should I play this hand or even fold; or should I double down and see where it takes me? I could lose it all, or I could achieve greatness, or at least something better than average.
Depending on the day and your mood, the next morning you look into the fridge, see the stock, and decide which one it is. One day, thinking of the consommé I used to have every so often as a kid, I decided to try and make it. I went online and into my treasure trove of well-thumbed cookbooks, and did a lot of R&D. The consommé recipe I decided on was from Martha Stewart, tweaked with whatever knowledge I gleaned from hours of reading everything from Larousse to Julia Child to Cooks Illustrated and back again. I've never been a huge fan of Martha Stewart's recipes but I will give her this: She takes classics, tests the hell out of them, preserves their value, and then amends them with a more modern approach.
Consomme begins by skimming off the fat from the stock and then putting the soup aside. What you need is a pound of lean (93 per cent in fact) ground beef, five whipped egg whites, a celery stock, one small carrot, a half yellow onion, and a small tomato. Mince the carrot and celery, beat the egg whites, and mix them by hand with the ground beef. Put into a fridge for at least an hour, cut up the tomato, char the onion over a flame and then cut that up too, and then mix it with the chilled beef/carrot/celery/egg white. Now here's where the rubber hits the road. Take the mixture and slide it gently into your stock. At this point there is no looking back. Heat to medium, all the while whisking -- and I mean whisking vigorously -- until the meat and vegetables are married to the stock.
Exchange the whisk with a wooden spoon and stir gently until the stock starts to bubble at the side and the beef mixture becomes what's called a raft, sitting at the top. Stop stirring, moderate the temperature so it keeps to a simmer, and use the spoon to put a hole in the middle of the raft to let the whole thing breathe. At this point if everything has gone correctly (and sometimes it doesn't, I can assure you) you have consommé, beautiful clear soup below, a brown disgusting looking meat raft above, the inverse of heaven and hell. For the next hour-and-a-half the slow simmer imparts a final hit of flavor. When the raft starts to sink, it's time for the decanting. Slow simmering is the key here because if you are already patting yourself on the back for a job well done and go off for a drink and leave the heat just a little too high you will jeopardize the whole thing.
Straining the clarified stock is a delicate task that should be done meticulously and without distraction. To start I use a very fine strainer lined with cheesecloth, carefully ladling the liquid through the hole in the raft without pushing down or disturbing the meat and vegetable layer. Doing so will cloud up the final product. Once done, toss out the raft and run the liquid through a coffee filter. You can do this a few more times if you are even more obsessive than I am but I don't see the need. Finally, just in case you think you're finished, lightly skim the top of the consommé with a piece of paper towel bent into a u-shape. This removes any remaining fat. What should stand before you is perfect consommé -- clear, glistening, incredibly flavorful. The result of a lot of work and determination, not to mention cooking skill and patience.
It can be frozen without losing much taste but ideally it should be served immediately and of course hot with the aforementioned chervil and good sherry. Go light on the latter, and keep the portions small, preferably in two- to three-ounce cups. It can be served cold in gelatin form and people from a certain (i.e. previous) generation enjoy it that way, usually with a lot of ground pepper and even Worchester, but I've never been a fan. Good consommé should be served hot and without the need of spice and salt, and to my mind it defeats the purpose. A little sherry gives it nice color and a boozy hit that doesn't interfere with its flavor, only enhances it, and the chervil is mainly decorative but also complements the consommé and is not an herb most people encounter often but usually enjoy.
As I turn 50 and think of old age and the various setbacks that accompany a half-century, there are very few maladies I can conjure that would prevent me from drinking consommé, as opposed to eating large steaks, smoking, and consuming copious amounts of liquor. So like playing golf or backgammon it is a pleasure that has longevity on its side. I'll know when it's all over when I refuse a cup of perfectly made consommé, preferring instead to close my eyes and sleep forever. May that be a long time from now.