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Consomme with Vermicelli
Break the vermicelli into pieces one and a half to three inches in length, cook in boiling salted water, blanch and simmer for fifteen minutes in the consomme. Allow a tablespoonful of the vermicelli, before cooked, to each plate. Spaghetti or macaroni or any of the Italian pastes may be used instead of the vermicelli. With spaghetti or macaroni sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese over the top of each plate, and serve at once.
A garnish instruction rather than a full soup: it assumes you already have clear consomm\boplaced as boiling, blanching, then a fifteen-minute simmer, which is more handling than modern pasta needs.
- The hinge: keep the consomm",The hinge: keep the consomme clear -- Starch clouds clear soup, which is the likeliest reason the vermicelli is boiled in separate salted water (and, on the usual reading of 'blanch', rinsed) before it touches the consomme; skipping that step risks turning a clarified stock murky.
- "Blanch" here means rinse"Blanch" here probably means drain and rinse -- in cookbooks of this period, blanching pasta or rice often meant draining it and pouring cold water through to wash off surface starch and stop the cooking, rather than the vegetable sense of a quick dip in boiling water.
- Cut the simmerFifteen minutes in the consomm\bf will reduce dried vermicelli to mush, since it was already cooked in water. Boil the pasta until barely tender, rinse, then warm it in the soup for a minute or two before serving.
- PortionA tablespoon of dry vermicelli per plate is right for a first-course soup \bf roughly 1 oz dry pasta serves four. Use about 1 to 1 1/4 cups consomm\bf per plate.
- Vermicelli then and nowThe vermicelli of these books is a fine dried wheat pasta, sold in long strands or coiled nests, not rice vermicelli. Any thin dried noodle broken into short lengths behaves the same way.
- Cheese with the larger pastesParmesan is directed only for spaghetti or macaroni, not for the fine vermicelli, and it goes over the top of each plate rather than being stirred into the pot. Grated cheese sitting in hot consomme clumps and greases the surface.
- Salt the pasta water, not the soupConsomm\bf is normally seasoned already and will taste sharper as it stands on the stove. Season the cooking water for the pasta and check the soup only at the end.