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Vermicelli Soup
1 quart clear soup 1 ounce vermicelli Salt and pepper Break the vermicelli into short lengths, and cook in the boiling soup until tender, and then serve.
Three lines and one real decision: everything depends on the stock, since the pasta contributes almost nothing but body. Treat this as a template rather than a recipe.
- "Clear soup" in a meatless book"Clear soup" -- If the source is indeed a meatless collection, this would mean a strained, uncloudy vegetable broth rather than a meat consommé; the recipe itself does not say. Either way, strain through a fine sieve or cloth so the finished soup stays translucent.
- An ounce of vermicelliAbout 30 g dry, roughly a quarter cup once broken up. That is deliberately sparse — a garnish for a quart of broth, not a bowl of pasta. Doubling it turns the soup into something closer to a noodle stew and clouds the broth badly.
- Cooking timeThe recipe says only "until tender." Modern dried vermicelli or capellini needs 4 to 6 minutes in simmering broth; taste at 4. Overcooked strands shed starch and the clarity the recipe is built on disappears.
- Break it shortSnapping the strands to about an inch is not decorative. Long threads wrap around the spoon and drag broth off the surface; short lengths stay suspended and eat cleanly.
- Cook it separately if holdingPasta left standing in hot broth keeps swelling and drinking the liquid. If the soup is not going straight to the table, boil the vermicelli in salted water, drain, and drop it into the hot broth in the bowls.
- Seasoning lastThe pasta absorbs some liquid and seasoning as it cooks, so salt at the end. Freshly ground white pepper keeps the surface clear; black pepper flecks it.
- YieldFour cups of soup — four small first-course servings, or two modern bowls.
Vermicelli — Italian for "little worms" — reached English kitchens well before the nineteenth century as an imported dried paste, and by the Victorian period it was a standard garnish for clear soups, sold in coiled nests or long bundles and broken up as needed. Adding a starch garnish to a clear broth was the accepted way to turn a first course into something substantial without clouding it, and cookbooks of the era list vermicelli soup, macaroni soup and semolina soup as near-identical variations on the same quart of stock. The whole genre of clear soups was built on beef and veal bones, so any version made without them had to prove that a vegetable broth could stand up as the entire dish, unmasked by cream or purée.