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Macaroni Soup
Put one-fourth pound of macaroni into a saucepan with one ounce of butter and an onion stuck with five or six cloves, and boil until the macaroni is quite tender; remove it, drain, place it in a saucepan and pour over two quarts of good broth. Place the pan at the side of the fire and simmer the macaroni gently for about ten minutes, taking care that it does not break or become pulpy. Add a little grated Parmesan cheese, pour all into a tureen and serve.
A clear broth soup that lives or dies on the stock. Oscar's method cooks the macaroni separately and only briefly finishes it in the broth, which keeps the soup clear rather than starchy.
- The missing waterThe first step gives butter, onion and macaroni but no liquid. Boil the macaroni in a generous pot of salted water with the butter and clove-studded onion added to it; the aromatics are there to scent the pasta, not to be a sauce.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound is 4 oz (about 115 g) of dry macaroni, and two quarts is 8 cups of broth. That ratio is deliberately thin by modern standards, closer to a consommé with pasta in it than to a thick soup.
- Macaroni of the periodMacaroni of this era was often sold as long hollow tubes to be snapped into lengths at the pot, though short-cut forms were also available. Modern elbow macaroni works, and small ditalini gives a neater result; the recipe does not specify a shape.
- Undercook the first boil"Quite tender" followed by another ten minutes in broth will give mush. Pull the pasta two or three minutes short of al dente so the finish in the broth brings it to the right point.
- Side of the fireOn a coal range, the cooler edge of the top plate held a bare tremble. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil is what breaks the tubes and clouds the soup.
- The onionStud a peeled onion with five or six whole cloves so they can be retrieved in one piece. Discard it with the cooking water; it has done its work.
- Broth"good broth" is unspecified; a well-skimmed, lightly seasoned meat stock such as veal or chicken suits it, since the broth is the whole body of the dish. Salt at the end, after the Parmesan, which brings its own.
- Cheese and serviceGrate the Parmesan finely and stir it in off the heat, or pass it separately so it does not string. Two quarts serves six to eight as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms at a moment when Italian pasta was well established in Anglo-American cookery, having appeared in American cookbooks since the early nineteenth century, and had long since been absorbed into French cooking as macaroni. The clove-studded onion is a French habit, the oignon clout amel to pot-au-feu. Soups of this kind, built on a clear well-made broth with one modest garnish, opened long service menus precisely because they were light; the substance came later in the meal. Grated Parmesan was already the expected finish, though at the time it would have arrived as a hard imported wheel and been grated to order rather than bought ready-grated.