Vermicelli Soup
Make the stock in the usual manner, by boiling shanks of beef or bones of beef, mutton, turkey or chicken all day. Strain, and next morning skim the grease carefully off. Cut up whatever vegetables you wish to flavor your soup with-cabbage, carrots, onions, and celery; brown these slowly in some of the dripping taken from the stock. Boil the vegetables for three hours in the stock and strain again. Then add vermicelli. Flavor with Worcester Sauce, and boil about fifteen minutes.
A two-day broth reduced to a few lines. The method is sound; the timings belong to a coal range that was alight anyway.
- The stock, realistically"Boiling all day" means a bare simmer at the back of a range. Four to five hours for beef shanks and bones, two to three for poultry carcasses, is ample on a modern burner; a hard boil clouds the stock and emulsifies the fat you are trying to remove.
- Why it rests overnightChilling the strained stock sets the fat into a solid cap that lifts off cleanly, which is the whole point of the instruction. A shallow container chills faster and is safer than leaving a stockpot of warm broth out; refrigerate it once it has stopped steaming.
- "Dripping taken from the stock"The skimmed beef fat, used to brown the vegetables. Any neutral fat or butter does the same job; browning them slowly is what gives this soup its colour and sweetness, so do not rush it to a scorch.
- Three hours of vegetablesFar longer than needed, and cabbage held that long turns sulphurous. Forty-five minutes to an hour extracts everything worth having, after which the vegetables are strained out and discarded anyway.
- VermicelliHere the thin wheat pasta, not rice vermicelli. Break it into short lengths and give it the fifteen minutes only if the strands are thick; fine modern vermicelli is done in three to five minutes and goes to paste beyond that. Cook it in the soup only if serving at once, otherwise it swells and drinks the broth.
- Worcester SauceWorcestershire. Start with a teaspoon per quart and taste; it is doing the work of salt and depth together, and the recipe calls for no salt at any earlier stage.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working guide, 3 to 4 lb of bones and 4 quarts of water would reduce to something like 2 to 3 quarts of finished soup, or six to eight first-course servings with a generous handful of vermicelli.
Vermicelli — Italian for "little worms" — is generally said to have reached English and American kitchens as a dried imported pasta before macaroni was made domestically in any quantity, and by the late nineteenth century a boxed bundle of it was a pantry staple, often turning up in clear soups. That is exactly its role here: the recipe is really a lesson in stock, with the pasta added at the end as the thing that turns broth into a course. The two-day rhythm, all-day simmer and overnight chill, reflects a kitchen with a range that was never cold and a cool larder rather than a refrigerator. The reliance on bottled Worcestershire for seasoning points to a style of household cookery that could lean on a commercial sauce to flavour dishes that older cookery would have built from spices and wine.