Macaroni Soup
1 quart Brown Soup Stock 1/4 cup macaroni, broken in half-inch pieces. Salt
A minimal formula of the kind common in early twentieth-century cookery manuals, where the method for a garnished clear soup was assumed to be known. Everything depends on cooking the macaroni properly and keeping the stock clear.
- The hinge: cook the macaroni separatelyBoil the pieces in salted water until just tender, drain, and rinse, then add them to the hot stock. Cooking pasta directly in the stock releases starch and clouds what should be a clear brown soup.
- Brown soup stockIn this period that means a stock from browned beef bones and meat with onion, carrot and herbs, simmered long and strained. A good unsalted beef stock or a rich commercial broth stands in; if using a salty commercial product, hold back on the added salt until the end.
- QuantitiesA quart is 4 cups, and 1/4 cup of dry macaroni is roughly 1 ounce. Broken into half-inch lengths it swells to something under a cup cooked, which is a light garnish rather than a thick pasta soup.
- Macaroni then and nowNineteenth- and early twentieth-century macaroni came as long hollow tubes, which is why the recipe says to break it. Elbow macaroni or ditalini needs no breaking; small tubes hold the broth best.
- TimingModern dried macaroni takes about 7 to 10 minutes to reach tender, though books of this period often called for considerably longer boiling. Once it is in the stock, serve promptly \brokekeeps absorbing liquid and turns soft and swollen.
- SeasoningSalt is the only seasoning listed, which was normal for a clear soup meant to taste of its stock. Black pepper and a little grated Parmesan at the table are period-appropriate additions.
- YieldA quart serves four as a first course, in cups rather than deep bowls.
Clear stock with a starch garnish was the workhorse of the soup chapter in American domestic-science cookbooks, where one well-made brown stock was expected to yield a dozen named soups depending on what was dropped into it — macaroni, rice, barley, vermicelli, or a julienne of vegetables. Macaroni reached American kitchens as an imported dry good long before large-scale Italian immigration, sold in long tubes by the pound and treated as a genteel, faintly foreign ingredient rather than as Italian food; recipes of this era routinely instruct the cook to break it, since no one expected to eat a two-foot tube from a soup cup. The extreme brevity of the entry is itself characteristic: the book teaches stock-making once, at length, and thereafter assumes the reader can assemble a soup from a list.