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Vermicelli Soup
Put from three to four pounds of knuckle of veal, one and one-half pounds of scrag of mutton and one-half pound of ham, all cut up into small pieces, into a saucepan with one-fourth pound of butter, and an onion stuck with one or two cloves, and fry them over the fire for ten minutes. Put in with the meat a bunch of sweet herbs, one anchovy, two carrots, three or four blades of mace and four heads of celery. Place the lid on the saucepan and stand it over the fire until all the gravy has been extracted from the meat. Drain the gravy into a basin, pour four quarts of water over the meat and boil slowly until reduced to three pints. Strain the soup into another saucepan, add one-fourth pound of vermicelli, a head of celery cut into small pieces and a small quantity of cayenne pepper and salt. Put a French roll into a soup tureen, pour a small quantity of the soup on it, let it soak for a few minutes, then pour in the remainder of the soup and serve.
Vermicelli,-Queen Style Blanch the vermicelli in boiling water, them drain it; put it into a saucepan with rich broth, season to taste and let it boil gently until cooked. Beat well the yolks of eight eggs and mix a small quantity of cream with them; pour them into the soup and stir them by the side of the fire for a few minutes, but do not allow them to boil. Turn the vermicelli into a tureen and serve it with a plate of sippets of toast.
Two soups run together here: a long-extracted veal and mutton broth finished with vermicelli, and a shorter "Queen Style" version thickened with egg yolks. Both assume a coal range where a covered pot can sit at a bare simmer for hours.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonIn the Queen Style version the yolks and cream must be stirred in off direct heat and held below about 180F. If the soup boils after the eggs go in, it curdles into threads and cannot be brought back.
- "Until all the gravy has been extracted"After the ten-minute fry the pot is covered and left over low heat so that the meat and vegetables release their juices. The recipe gives no time for this stage. The drawn-off gravy, set aside in a basin and returned later, carries much of the flavour of the finished soup.
- The cutsKnuckle of veal is the shank, sold as veal osso buco or soup bone; it supplies the gelatin. Scrag of mutton is the neck end, now sold as lamb neck. Ordinary lamb will taste milder than the mutton intended. Ask a butcher to saw the veal knuckle into pieces.
- Reduction and yieldFour quarts is eight pints, so reducing to three pints is a little better than a two-and-a-half to one reduction, and will take some hours at a slow simmer. Skim as it goes.
- Heads of celeryA "head" is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Four heads in the stockpot is deliberate and gives the soup its dominant vegetable note; the fifth head, cut small, goes into the strained soup as garnish and needs about 10 minutes to soften.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg; a blade is one dried piece. Three or four blades are roughly equivalent to half a teaspoon or so of ground mace, though published conversions vary; ground mace is better added late than boiled for hours.
- The anchovyOne salted anchovy in four quarts is a seasoning, not a flavour. It reads as depth and salinity. Hold back on salt until the soup is reduced, since both the ham and the anchovy concentrate.
- Vermicelli and the French rollA quarter pound of vermicelli in three pints gives a very thick soup by modern taste; two to three ounces is closer to current expectation. The French roll is a small crusty white roll, set in the tureen to soak in a little of the soup before the remainder is poured over.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toasted bread, served alongside to dip. Cut them thin so they crisp rather than dry.
Vermicelli soup belongs to an eighteenth and nineteenth century English tradition: a heavy multi-meat foundation of veal for body, mutton for flavour and ham for salt, cooked twice over to extract everything, then garnished with a small quantity of Italian pasta. The "Queen Style" finish recalls potage a la reine, a French white soup whose name is traditionally attached to the sixteenth century French court, though the attribution is not documented and rests on tradition rather than record. That a grand-hotel book still printed a recipe calling for scrag of mutton, blades of mace and a French roll soaked in the tureen shows how directly the American hotel repertoire drew on English household cookery, filtered through French service. The two-stage extraction, drawing off the concentrated first gravy before adding water, suits a range that stayed hot all day.