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Vermicelli Soup with Tomato Puree
Prepare three quarts of fish stock, as for thick soup; when boiling move it to the side of the fire and let it simmer for half an hour. Make one and one-half pints of fresh tomato puree. Skim the fat off the soup, put in a bunch of parsley and sweet herbs and the tomato puree, then allow it to simmer for twenty minutes longer. Boil gently in salted water one-half pound of vermicelli. Strain the soup. put in the vermicelli, skim off all the fat and boil up again. Turn the soup into a tureen, and serve.
A hotel soup written in shorthand for cooks who already knew the house stock. The instructions assume a coal range and a separate stockpot; the sequence still works on a modern stove with two adjustments in mind.
- Cook the vermicelli separately, and drain it wellThe pasta goes into salted water on its own and joins the strained soup only at the end. Boiling it in the soup itself clouds the broth with starch and swells the strands into a solid mass by the time it reaches the table.
- "Move it to the side of the fire"On a range, the cooler edge of the plate held a bare simmer. Translate as the lowest steady heat that keeps a few bubbles breaking, not a rolling boil, which turns fish stock cloudy and bitter.
- Fish stock, and how long"As for thick soup" presumably refers the cook to another stock recipe in the book, which is not reproduced here. Fish bones give up most of what they have in 20 to 30 minutes; long boiling tends to make the stock gluey and sharp, so treat the half-hour simmer as an upper limit rather than a minimum.
- MeasuresThree quarts is 12 cups; one and a half pints of purée is 3 cups, which for fresh tomatoes means roughly 3 to 4 lb, peeled, seeded and cooked down. Half a pound of vermicelli in 3 quarts of liquid gives a very full soup by modern standards; a third of that is closer to current taste.
- "A bunch of parsley and sweet herbs"A bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or bundled in cheesecloth. Sweet herbs meant the soft culinary herbs generally, as against the medicinal or bitter ones. It is removed when the soup is strained.
- SkimmingThe recipe tells you to skim twice, which is not padding. Fish stock throws a good deal of fat and scum, and a clear surface is the difference between this and a muddy broth. Chilling the stock and lifting the solid fat does the job faster than a ladle.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve or a sieve lined with damp muslin before the vermicelli goes in, or the tomato pulp and herb debris will hang in the bowl.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 first-course servings. It thickens noticeably as it stands, so hold back some stock to loosen it if it is not going straight to the table.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 Cook Book collected the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchens, and this is a fair specimen: a fish-stock soup dressed with tomato, meatless and therefore useful on Fridays and through Lent, when a New York hotel still needed a full menu for observant guests. Vermicelli, "little worms" in Italian, had been sold dried in America since well before the Civil War and appears in English and American cookery books throughout the nineteenth century, usually as a garnish for clear soups rather than as pasta in its own right. The tomato purée marks the period as much as anything: by the 1890s tomatoes had moved from suspect novelty to a standard thickening and colouring agent in hotel cooking, folded into soups and sauces where an older kitchen would have reached for a roux or a browning.