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Cream of Sphaghetti
1 cup spaghetti, small pieces. 3 cups white stock. 1/2 onion, grated fine. 1 pt. cream sauce.
Cook spaghetti in boiling, salted water. Drain off water and add heated stock. Gradually add one pint of cream sauce. Season, and, if desired, add the beaten yolk of two eggs or serve with one hard-boiled yolk in each bowl.
A cream soup built on two prepared components the book assumes you already have: white stock and a pint of cream sauce. Get those right and the rest is assembly.
- Cream sauce means béchamelCream sauce here is the book's own white sauce — milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, essentially a béchamel. A pint is 2 cups; a standard medium white sauce of that volume runs to about 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Add it gradually to the hot stock, as directed.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock made without browning the bones, so the soup stays pale. Modern boxed stock is usually already salted; taste before you season at the end.
- Cook the spaghetti shortBreak it into half-inch lengths and boil it a minute or two shy of al dente. It goes on softening in the hot stock and cream sauce, and overcooked pasta will cloud the soup with starch.
- The grated onionHalf a raw grated onion in three cups of stock is assertive. Either soften it in a little butter first, or add it to the stock and let it simmer ten minutes before the sauce goes in.
- The egg yolk liaisonThis is the hinge. Whisk the two beaten yolks with a ladleful of hot soup, return the mixture to the pot off the heat, and keep the soup below a simmer — around 170-180F. Boil it and you get sweet scrambled egg suspended in broth.
- SeasoningSalt and white pepper; white pepper keeps the specks out. Nutmeg is a common seasoning in milk-thickened sauces of the period, though this recipe does not call for it.
- The alternative garnishThe hard-boiled yolk is served whole in each bowl, to be broken up with the spoon: an alternative to the beaten-yolk liaison rather than a thickener for the soup itself.
- YieldRoughly six cups finished (three cups stock, a pint of cream sauce, plus the cooked spaghetti), or four to six servings as a first course.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for American households in the years around the First World War, and her cream soups show the period's habit of stretching a modest quantity of stock with milk, flour and a starch — here, pasta. Spaghetti had appeared in American cookbooks well before the 1910s, arriving through Italian immigration and usually treated as an ingredient to be absorbed into familiar forms rather than cooked in its own tradition: baked with cheese, boiled soft, or, as here, broken up and folded into a béchamel-based soup. The finishing liaison of egg yolks is much older and widespread across European cooking, with France often credited with standardising rather than originating it — a common way to enrich a velouté or a cream soup; the option of a whole hard-boiled yolk dropped in the bowl is the thrifty domestic version of the same idea.