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Macaroni Soup
This soup is easily prepared, and at short notice. Boil some macaroni for fifteen or twenty minutes in boiling water salted a little. Drain in a colander, and have ready boiling two quarts of clear stock. Cut the macaroni into two-inch lengths, or into rings, and boil in the stock for a few minutes. Send grated Parmesan to table on a dish. Probable cost, 1s. per quart. Sufficient for eight persons.
A clear soup that depends almost entirely on the quality of the stock; the macaroni is texture, not flavour. Two adjustments matter most: the pasta cooking time and the fact that Victorian macaroni was a different product from the dried elbows sold today.
- The macaroniIn this period macaroni meant long, hollow, straight tubes, wider in the bore than the modern dried elbow, which is why the recipe tells you to cut it into two-inch lengths or into rings. Long ziti or bucatini is a reasonable modern match; short cut elbows work but skip the cutting step.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes suited the macaroni of the period. Contemporary dried pasta needs 8-11 minutes, and here it should be pulled a minute or two short of done since it finishes in the stock.
- Why boil it separatelyCooking the pasta in water first and draining it keeps the starch out of the broth. Boiling it directly in the stock will cloud a soup whose whole point is clarity.
- Clear stockTwo quarts of good beef or veal stock, strained and skimmed of fat. Supermarket cartons will do but are usually undersalted and thin; reduce slightly and taste before the pasta goes in, as the pasta will absorb seasoning.
- Quantity of macaroniThe original gives none. For two quarts of stock serving eight, 4-6 oz (about 115-170 g) dried pasta gives a soup rather than a stew.
- Parmesan at tableSending the cheese separately is deliberate. Grated Parmesan stirred into the pot will thread and cloud the broth; passed at the table each diner adds it to the surface of their own bowl.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling per quart works out at about threepence a head across eight servings, and eight servings from two quarts means roughly a cup each, in line with a first course rather than a main.
Cassell's places this among the simplest of the clear soups, and its ease is the point: by the later nineteenth century dried macaroni was cheap, shelf-stable and widely available in British grocers, having shifted over the preceding century from an expensive Italian import to an everyday store-cupboard staple. Sending Parmesan to table on a separate dish may echo the older English handling of macaroni, which came to Britain largely as a baked or dressed cheese dish rather than as a sauced pasta. What the recipe really assumes is a household with stockpot habits: a cook with two quarts of clear stock on hand could produce a creditable first course in twenty minutes, which is precisely the claim the opening sentence makes.