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Vermicelli Soup
For eight persons take a quarter of a pound of vermicelli, and blanch it in boiling water to take off the taste of dust. Strain it, and throw it into some broth that is boiling, otherwise the vermicelli will stick together, and cannot be separated unless crumbled into a thousand pieces. Mind, the vermicelli must be boiled in broth before you mix it with any of the puree, and take care to break the vermicelli before you blanch it in the water, otherwise it will be in long pieces and unpleasant to serve up.
A method note rather than a full recipe: the broth is assumed, and the whole point is how to handle the pasta so it stays separate. Two details carry the dish.
- The hingeAdd the vermicelli to broth that is at a rolling boil, never to still or barely simmering liquid. Starch shed from stationary strands glues them into a mat that no amount of stirring will undo.
- Blanching for dustDry goods of this kind were often kept loose or stored for long periods, which is the likely sense of the rinse. Modern packaged pasta needs no such treatment; if you skip it, allow a little longer in the broth.
- Breaking it firstSnap the nests or coils into short lengths before they go anywhere near water. Long strands in a clear soup are awkward on a spoon, which is the objection being made here.
- Quantity and yieldA quarter pound is 4 oz (about 115 g) for eight, so roughly half an ounce a head. The recipe gives no quantity of broth.
- TimingFine vermicelli cooks in only a few minutes in boiling broth. Cook it until just tender, since it will keep softening in the hot soup on its way to the table.
- "Purée" hereA purée soup is a sieved base of vegetables, pulses or poultry. The recipe simply insists the vermicelli be boiled in broth before it meets the purée; cook it separately and combine at the end.
- Cloudy brothPasta boiled directly in a clear soup can muddy it, though the recipe itself directs cooking the vermicelli in broth after blanching. If clarity matters, cook it in a ladleful of broth set aside for the purpose and lift it into the tureen.
Vermicelli — Italian for "little worms" — was known in English kitchens by the eighteenth century as an imported item and was a fixture of nineteenth-century soup cookery, valued because a few ounces could turn a plain broth into a presentable course. The passage has the shape of a method note rather than a full receipt: no broth recipe, no seasoning, just the two faults a cook was expected to avoid, clumping and unwieldy long strands. The instruction to blanch away "the taste of dust" belongs to an era of loose dry goods stored for months; the flat imperative "Mind" reads as the voice of a kitchen where a matted tureen of vermicelli was a visible failure.