Macaroni Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.-3 oz. of macaroni, a piece of butter the size of a walnut, salt to MACAROONS. taste, 2 quarts of clear stock. AVERAGE CosT, 1s. 9d. INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.—3 oz. of macaroni, a piece of butter the size of a walnut, salt to taste, 2 quarts of clear stock. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Throw the macaroni and butter into boiling water, with a pinch of salt and simmer for 1/21 an hour. When it is tender, drain and cut it into thin rings or lengths and drop it into the boiling stock. Stew gently for 15 minutes and serve grated Parmesan cheese with it.
TIME. to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
A clear soup that depends entirely on the stock; the macaroni is a garnish, not a thickener. Two quarts serves eight as a first course.
- The stock is the dishWith only pasta, butter and salt beside it, nothing hides a weak broth. Use a well-reduced, properly clarified beef or veal stock, or a good chicken stock, and season it before the macaroni goes in.
- Cook the macaroni separatelyBoiling it in water first, then draining, keeps the starch out of the consommé so it stays clear. Dropping dry pasta straight into the stock will cloud it.
- TimingPeriod recipes routinely give half an hour or more for macaroni, which was generally sold as a thicker, harder dried pasta than today's. Modern dried macaroni is done in 8-10 minutes, and a further 15 minutes stewing in stock will turn it to mush -- boil it a couple of minutes short of al dente, then give it 3-4 minutes in the hot stock.
- The shapeThe instruction to cut it into rings or lengths assumes long tubular macaroni sold in straight rods. Short-cut elbow macaroni needs no cutting; about 3 oz (85 g) dry is right for the quantity of stock.
- "A piece of butter the size of a walnut"Usually reckoned at roughly half an ounce to an ounce (15-30 g), i.e. one to two tablespoons. In the cooking water it does little beyond discouraging the pasta from sticking, and can be left out.
- ParmesanServed grated at the table rather than stirred in, so it does not string in the clear broth.
- Cost noteThe 1s. 9d. average cost is a pre-decimal shilling figure from the original edition and has no useful modern equivalent.
Macaroni reached British kitchens as an Italian luxury and was still being treated as a delicacy well into the nineteenth century -- eighteenth-century travellers who came back from the Grand Tour full of continental taste were nicknamed "macaronis" for it. By Mrs Beeton's day it had become a staple of the middle-class larder, cheap, keeping indefinitely, and endlessly useful for stretching a soup or baking with cheese. This recipe is the plainest possible use of it: the household's clear stock, made from the week's bones, dressed up into a course that reads as Italian at almost no extra cost. The direction to serve Parmesan separately reflects standard practice for clear soups, where anything stirred in would spoil the look of the broth.