Maccaroni Soup
Three ounces of maccaroni; a piece of butter the size of a walnut; salt to taste; two quarts of clear stock.
Throw the maccaroni into boiling water, with a pinch of salt, and simmer for half an hour; when it is tender, drain and cut it into thin rings and drop into boiling stock. Stew gently for fifteen minutes and serve.
A plain broth-and-pasta soup of the sort that opened a formal dinner. The only real decisions are the shape of the macaroni and how much you let it swell.
- Amounts in modern termsThree ounces of dry macaroni is about 3/4 cup of small tubes. A piece of butter the size of a walnut is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons; the recipe never says where it goes, so add it to the stock or toss the drained macaroni in it.
- The macaroni is not modern elbowsPeriod macaroni meant long, straight, fairly thick tubes, which is why the instruction is to cut it into thin rings after cooking. Buy bucatini or ziti and slice it, or skip the step and use ditalini, which is already ring-sized.
- Cut the boiling timeHalf an hour suited the coarse dried pasta of the period. Modern dried macaroni is done in 8-10 minutes, and it will keep swelling in the hot stock, so pull it a minute short of al dente.
- Two quarts of clear stock"Clear" means a strained, fat-free broth, ideally consommé-clear. Starch clouds it, so cook and drain the pasta in separate water as directed rather than boiling it in the stock.
- Second simmerFifteen minutes in the stock is generous once the pasta is already tender. Five is enough to marry the flavours; longer and the rings soften to mush and cloud the broth.
- SeasoningSalt to taste depends entirely on the stock. Season at the end, and grated Parmesan passed at the table is traditional though the recipe does not mention it.
- YieldTwo quarts serves eight as a first course, six as a light lunch.
Macaroni soup belongs to a long line of English and American attempts to domesticate Italian pasta, which is often associated with the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, though macaroni dishes appear in English cookery well before that, and by the late nineteenth century had settled into a handful of standard uses: baked with cheese, and dropped into clear soup. Its presence in a household manual reflects the era's dinner structure, where a light clear soup was expected to open the meal and the cook needed a repertoire of garnishes for the same pot of stock — vermicelli, sago, custard royale, or macaroni cut into rings. The instruction to cook the pasta separately and cut it down to a spoon-friendly size is the giveaway that this is a soup built for a formal table, where a clear broth and a manageable mouthful mattered more than the pasta itself.