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Pepper (Quart Brown Soup Stock cup)
1 quart Brown Soup Stock 1/4 cup macaroni, broken in half-inch pieces.
Cook macaroni in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, and add to stock heated to boiling-point. Season with salt and pepper. Spaghetti or other Italian pastes may be substituted for macaroni.
A clear brown stock with pasta added at the last moment — the whole thing depends on the stock, since nothing else contributes flavour.
- Brown Soup StockIn this book that is built on beef shin with marrow, part of the meat browned before simmering, with vegetables and seasonings, then strained and cleared of fat. A good unsalted beef stock or a rich commercial beef broth stands in; season only at the end, since reduced broths are already salty.
- Cook the pasta separatelyThe instruction to boil the macaroni in its own salted water and drain it is the hinge. Starch shed into the stock clouds it, and a clear brown soup that has gone cloudy has lost its point.
- Macaroni of the periodMacaroni was commonly sold as long straight hollow tubes, which is why the recipe calls for it "broken in half-inch pieces." Ditalini, tubetti or short elbows give the same result without breaking anything.
- "Until soft"The book means genuinely soft, not al dente. It will sit in hot stock besides, so stop a shade short of collapse.
- QuantityA quarter cup of dry pasta in a quart of stock is deliberately sparse: this is a first course, not a bowl of pasta in broth. Doubling the macaroni turns it into something else.
- YieldA quart serves four as a soup course, in cups rather than bowls. Serve at once; the pasta keeps swelling and softening in the hot liquid.
- FinishingGrated Parmesan at the table is in keeping with the note about Italian pastes, though the original does not call for it.
Fannie Farmer's soup chapter is built on a small number of stocks with a long list of variations hung off them, and this is one of the plainest: brown stock plus one addition. The phrase "Italian pastes" is worth noticing — in American cookbooks of this period macaroni and spaghetti seem generally to have been treated as a single foreign category rather than as everyday pantry goods, and were most often boiled soft and used in soups or baked with cheese sauce. Dried pasta had been imported into the northeastern United States for decades by then, and domestic manufacture was expanding, but the mass Italian immigration that made spaghetti ordinary in American kitchens was only just underway when this book was being revised.