Home › The Principles of Cookery › VERMICELLI SOUP, WHITE (another way)
VERMICELLI SOUP, WHITE (another way)
Boil a quart of nicely-flavoured stock, break lightly two ounces of vermicelli, and blanch it in boiling water for five minutes, then put it into the soup, and boil till tender. Beat the yolk of an egg with two table-spoonfuls of cream. A few minutes before it is to be served, mix a spoonful or two of the soup with the egg, add it to the rest, and let it simmer gently for a short time, but the soup must not boil after the egg is added. Put a French roll at the bottom of a tureen, pour the soup over it, and serve. A few leaves of green chervil or finely-shredded parsley may, if liked, be added to the soup to improve its appearance. Time, from twelve to twenty minutes to boil the vermicelli.
A clear stock finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The whole dish turns on temperature control at the end, and on not treating modern pasta the way Victorian vermicelli was treated.
- Never let it boil after the eggThe yolk-and-cream liaison sets into curds at around 180F. Temper it with a ladle of hot soup, return it off the heat or over the lowest flame, and hold it below a shiver. Once it curdles nothing will bring it back.
- A quart, imperialCassell's quart is 40 fl oz, a little under 5 US cups (about 1.1 litres). Against that, the 2 oz of vermicelli gives a lightly garnished soup rather than a thick one.
- The vermicelli cooking timeTwelve to twenty minutes suited the thicker, coarser dried vermicelli of the period. Modern vermicelli cooks considerably faster, so go by the packet and taste early; you may prefer to skip the separate blanching and break it straight into the simmering stock rather than let it disintegrate.
- Why blanch at allThe blanching step was most likely to rinse off loose starch and help keep the soup clear. If clarity matters to you, cook the pasta separately in water and add it drained; otherwise cook it in the stock and accept a slightly cloudier result.
- Stock quality is the recipeWith no aromatics beyond a herb garnish, a "nicely-flavoured stock" means a properly made veal or chicken stock, seasoned and skimmed. Boxed stock will need reducing and correcting before it carries the dish.
- The French rollA small crusty white roll, not a baguette. Placed whole in the tureen it softens into the soup as it is ladled out; if that sounds unappealing, slice and dry it in a 300F oven and float the pieces instead.
- ChervilWorth seeking out rather than substituting: it has a faint anise note that parsley does not. Add it at the last moment, as its delicate flavour fades with cooking.
- YieldAround four small first-course servings from the quart. Season at the very end, after the liaison, since the cream flattens the salt.
White soups of this kind — a clear stock bound at the last moment with egg yolks and cream — belong to the French velouté and potage à la reine tradition familiar on the nineteenth-century English dinner table, where a pale soup and a brown soup were often offered together so that guests could choose. Vermicelli, "little worms" in Italian, had been imported into Britain since the eighteenth century and was among the earlier dried pastas to become familiar in the English kitchen; Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, treats it as an ordinary storecupboard item rather than anything foreign. The French roll waiting at the bottom of the tureen recalls the older sop, bread with liquid poured over it.