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Jelly Broth with Macaroni
Boil in salted water six or eight ounces of macaroni; when tender, drain, and cut it across into pieces about one and one-half inch in length. Have ready some boiling jelly broth and put it in the macaroni. In about ten minutes time turn the broth into a soup tureen, and serve with a plateful of grated Parmesan cheese.
A soup that is really an exercise in stock-making: the macaroni is incidental, and everything depends on the "jelly broth" the original assumes you already have simmering.
- What "jelly broth" meansNot a jelly and not a broth thickened with anything — it is a strong, well-reduced stock, concentrated enough that it sets when chilled. Aim for a stock that gels when cold; that gelatin is what gives the finished soup its body and clinging texture.
- QuantityOscar gives no volume for the broth. Six to eight ounces of dry macaroni is a lot of pasta for soup: roughly 3 quarts of broth would be in proportion, enough for eight or so as a first course.
- Cook the macaroni separately, as writtenThe instruction to boil it in salted water first and only then add it to the broth is the point of the recipe. Starch released into a clear consommé clouds it and dulls the shine of the gelatin.
- The ten minutesModern dried pasta is drained at the point of resistance, then given its last two or three minutes in the broth. Ten minutes in boiling stock on top of a full boil in water will leave you with paste; treat the ten minutes as an outer limit and taste at three.
- Cutting the macaroniMacaroni was commonly sold in long tubes in this period, hence the instruction to cut it "across" into inch-and-a-half lengths. Modern short-cut elbows or ditalini need no cutting; if you want the period effect, use long ziti or bucatini and cut it after draining.
- SeasoningSalt the pasta water properly but season the broth at the end, after it has reduced and after the Parmesan is factored in. A well-reduced consommé concentrates salt fast.
- ServingThe cheese goes to the table separately, not stirred in — grated Parmesan stirred into a clear soup clouds it and tends to clump. A tureen holds the heat, which matters with a gelatin-rich broth that thickens as it cools.
Jellied and jelly-rich consommés were the backbone of a grand hotel kitchen in Oscar Tschirky's day, when a stockpot ran continuously and veal knuckles, calves' feet and trimmings were cheap and plentiful; the ability of a broth to set on its own, without added gelatin, was often taken as proof that it had been made properly. This dish belongs to the family of light Italian-influenced soups that appeared on American hotel menus, arriving, it is generally said, by way of French practice — the pattern is essentially consommé aux pâtes, with grated Parmesan passed at table in the Italian manner. Its brevity here is telling: in a book published under the name of the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, a cook was assumed to have jelly broth on hand as a matter of course, so the recipe needed to say only what to do with it.