Consommé Alexandra

Consommé Alexandra (clarified chicken broth with tapioca, chicken, quenelles, and lettuce) teaches the discipline of clarity. The broth must remain brilliant enough to show every garnish beneath it, while the tapioca gives only the faintest body. One true thing before you touch a pan: if the consommé is not excellent and clear, nothing added later can disguise it.

The original assumed a saucier with chicken consommé always ready, a garnish station holding poached tapioca and quenelles, and muslin close at hand. Your honest equivalent is one saucepan, a fine sieve lined with damp cheesecloth, a warmed tureen, and the garnishes prepared in small quantities. The station is brigade scaffolding and can go; the clear consommé, separate poaching, precise ratio, and final boiling pour are the dish, so they stay. The book's quart formula is doubled here to about two quarts for eight first-course bowls, every proportion kept intact. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Done well, the broth is golden and lightly silken, with transparent tapioca, white chicken matchsticks, long grooved quenelles, and tender green ribbons holding their identities in each spoonful. Rinse the poached tapioca until the runoff is perfectly clear before it touches the consommé; that is the step that decides whether Alexandra gleams or goes murky.