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Beef Broth with Vermicelli
Cut some lean beef into small squares and chop it, put in a stew pan, with an egg broken and poured over; skim the fat off of two quarts of cold bouillon, and pour it over the whole, add a piece of leek, a piece of celery, and a little minced carrot, stirring occasionally. When it bubbles, move it to one side, and simmer gently for fifteen or twenty minutes. Drain into a good-sized bowl through a wet cloth, and skim off all the fat, and put it on to boil for five minutes longer, then add a few ounces of blanched vermicelli. Serve with toast, in a tureen.
This is a clarification, not a soup made from scratch: the beef, egg and vegetables exist to pull the cloud out of two quarts of ready-made bouillon and leave a clear broth to float the vermicelli in.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the egg and beef go in, bring it up slowly to a bare bubble, stirring until it begins to set, then stop stirring and move it off the direct heat. A rolling boil shreds the coagulated raft and drives the fine particles back into the liquid, and no amount of straining afterwards will recover the clarity.
- Cold stock, cold start"Skim the fat off of two quarts of cold bouillon" is doing two jobs. Fat lifts and sets on chilled stock so it can be pulled off in a sheet, and the egg must be combined with cold liquid so it disperses before it sets rather than seizing into lumps on contact.
- BouillonHere it means unsalted or lightly salted beef stock, not a cube. Two quarts of good stock; season only after clarifying, since the broth reduces a little in the process.
- The beef and eggThe recipe gives no weight; about 8 oz of lean beef, chopped fine (shin or chuck), and the one whole egg it calls for suit two quarts. Modern practice usually uses only whites, since the yolk contributes fat rather than clarifying power, but whole eggs appear in a number of period clarification recipes and work here.
- Straining through a wet clothDampen and wring out muslin or a doubled cheesecloth before lining the sieve — a dry cloth absorbs broth and traps fat. Ladle rather than pour, and do not press the solids.
- Blanched vermicelliCook the pasta separately in salted water until just short of done, drain, and add it to the broth for the final few minutes. Cooking it in the consommé releases starch and undoes the clarification.
- Quantity of vermicelli"A few ounces" for two quarts is generous by current taste; 2 oz dry gives a soup with body without turning it into a noodle bowl.
- Yield and serviceTwo quarts before clarifying gives roughly six servings once losses to the raft and skimming are counted. The recipe says only to serve it with toast, in a tureen.
Clear soups were the measure of a professional kitchen at the turn of the century. The technique itself is older than the hotel, a French method in which lean chopped meat and egg white are stirred into cold stock so that as the proteins coagulate they rise in a raft, sweeping up suspended solids on the way. Vermicelli — Italian for "little worms" — appears in English and American soup cookery from the eighteenth century onward, sold dried and broken up for the pot. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its ranges, compiled the book from the kitchen's repertoire, which is why entries like this read as terse notes to a cook who already knows what a consommé should look like.