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Cayenne (Tablespoons grated horseradish)
2 tablespoons grated horseradish 1 teaspoon vinegar ¼ cup macaroni rings Cook pepper and onion in butter five minutes. Add flour, stock, and tomatoes, and simmer fifteen minutes. Strain, rub through sieve, and season highly with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Just before serving add horseradish, vinegar, and macaroni previously cooked and cut in rings.
A highly seasoned tomato-stock soup, strained smooth and finished with raw horseradish, vinegar and small pasta rings. The finish is the whole point: everything sharp goes in off the heat.
- Add the horseradish off the heatGrated horseradish loses its pungency within a minute or two of boiling, and vinegar added early cooks flat. Both go in after the soup is strained and reseasoned, with the pot pulled from the burner.
- Use fresh-grated, not creamedThe horseradish intended here is the plain grated root, or the bottled kind packed only in vinegar. Creamed horseradish sauce will dull the heat and add dairy to a purée that has none.
- Macaroni ringsShort tubular macaroni sliced crosswise into thin rings, cooked separately so its starch does not thicken the strained soup. Anellini or ditalini are the modern equivalent; drain and rinse them, then add at the last moment.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient list is incomplete as printed, so the amounts of pepper, onion, butter, flour, stock and tomatoes are not recoverable from the page. Treat the method as a guide and work to a standard proportion of a scant tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of liquid.
- Straining"Strain, rub through sieve" means pushing the softened vegetables through, not discarding them. A food mill or a fine sieve and a stiff spoon does the work; a blender gives a thicker, more opaque result but is quicker.
- Season highlyThe instruction is deliberate. A soup finished with vinegar and raw horseradish needs a salt and cayenne level that would seem aggressive in the pot; taste again after the acid goes in.
This is the tomato-and-stock purée of the spectrum, with horseradish and vinegar alongside it. The macaroni rings belong to a wider late-nineteenth-century fashion for garnishing clear and puréed soups with small shaped pasta, custard royale or vegetable cutouts.