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VERMICELLI SOUP (another way) (Take a knuckle of veal)
Take a knuckle of veal and a scrag of mutton, from each of which cut the flesh into small pieces about the size of walnuts, and mix them together with five or six slices of lean ham. Put into the bottom of your pan about four ounces of butter, and then the meat; to which add four blades of mace, three carrots, two parsnips, two large onions with a clove stuck on both sides of each, four or five cut heads of celery, a bunch of sweet herbs, ten morels, and an anchovy. When these are prepared and mixed together in the pan, cover it very close, and set it over a slow fire without any water until the gravy is drawn out of the meat. This being effected, pour it into an earthen pan, and let the meat brown; then add to it four quarts of water. Let the whole stew gently until reduced to three pints, then strain it, and add the reserved gravy. Set it on the fire, add ten ounces of vermicelli, a head of celery cut small, cayenne pepper and salt, and let the whole simmer for about six minutes. Lay a French roll at the bottom of the tureen, pour the soup upon it, strew some vermicelli on the surface, and serve up.
This is a two-stage consommé: the meat is first sweated dry to build a fond, then that concentrated gravy is set aside and returned at the end so its flavour is not boiled away. Get that sequence right and the rest is straightforward.
- The hinge: dry sweatingThe meat, butter and vegetables go into a heavy covered pan over the lowest possible heat with no liquid at all, until the meat gives up its juices. Those juices are poured off and reserved; only then do you let the meat catch and brown in the pan. Rushing this step over high heat scorches the butter and turns the finished soup bitter.
- Cuts you will have to translateA knuckle of veal is the shin, gelatinous and now usually sold as osso buco or veal shank. A scrag of mutton is the neck end; lamb neck is the practical substitute, though it is milder. The recipe gives no weights; several pounds of bone-in meat between the two is implied by the four quarts of water.
- MorelsTen dried morels are ample and closer to what most cooks can get than fresh. Soak them, and strain the soaking liquor through a coffee filter before adding it — morels hold grit in their pits.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg; a blade is one whole piece. Ground mace can stand in, reckoning very roughly a quarter teaspoon per blade, though equivalences vary; add it late, as it turns dusty with long cooking.
- Anchovy'An anchovy' means one whole salted fish, not a single fillet. It is a seasoning here, not a flavour: it dissolves into the stock and does the work that a spoonful of fish sauce or a Parmesan rind does in a modern broth.
- Reduction and timeFour quarts down to three pints is a reduction of better than half; at a bare simmer, uncovered, allow three to four hours. Keep it at the barest tremble and skim, or the finished soup will not be clear.
- The vermicelli quantityTen ounces of vermicelli in three pints of broth will give you something close to a noodle stew. Four to five ounces suits modern expectations of a soup. Six minutes is right for old-fashioned coiled vermicelli; today's thin nests are done in two or three, so taste.
- The French rollA small crusty white roll, split and dried in a low oven so it holds its shape under the hot soup rather than collapsing into paste. A sliced baguette toasted dry does the same job.
- YieldThree pints of finished soup serves six generously as a first course.
Vermicelli soup appears again and again in English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century onward, and this version has the unmistakable structure of that period: a great weight of meat cooked to extract its essence, then thrown away, with pasta and a roll supplying the substance. Dried Italian pasta reached British kitchens as a luxury import — Hannah Glasse and her contemporaries treat vermicelli as a fashionable item, though Glasse also gives directions for making it — and it was prized precisely because it kept indefinitely in the store cupboard and cooked in minutes. The doubled meats, veal for body and gelatine, mutton for depth, with ham for salt and colour, are the standard English answer to French consommé, and the browning of the meat after the juices are drawn is often said to be a way of getting colour without caramel or burnt sugar, though the two methods coexist in the same books.