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Vermicelli Soup
Anonymous.
A knuckle of lamb, a small piece of veal, and water to cover well; when well cooked, season with salt, pepper, herbs to your taste, and a small onion, to which you may add Halford or Worcestershire sauce, about a tablespoonful. Have ready one-quarter of a pound of vermicelli, which has been boiled tender; strain your soup from the meat, add the vermicelli, let it boil well and serve.
A plain broth-and-noodle soup of the sort that used up a bone joint and a scrap of veal. The recipe assumes you know how to run a stockpot, so the useful detail is in quantities, timing and what the branded sauce was doing.
- The meatA knuckle of lamb is the lower foreleg or hind shank, sold today as a lamb shank; one shank of about 1 to 1.25 lb is right. "A small piece of veal" means roughly 8 oz of veal shank or breast, there for gelatine and body rather than flavour.
- Water to cover wellEnough to cover the meat generously, perhaps 2 to 3 quarts. Start it cold, bring it slowly to a bare tremble, and skim the grey foam in the first fifteen minutes or the finished soup will be cloudy.
- Cooking time"When well cooked" is 2½ to 3 hours at a simmer for shank meat to give up its collagen. Boiling hard will not speed it and will emulsify the fat into the broth.
- Herbs to your tasteA common period choice was a small bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, tied and pulled out before serving. Add it in the last hour; three hours of simmering strips thyme and parsley of aroma.
- Halford sauceHalford's Leicestershire Table Sauce was a widely advertised nineteenth-century rival to Lea & Perrins, no longer made. Worcestershire is the surviving equivalent, and a tablespoonful in a potful of broth is a seasoning for depth, not a flavour you should be able to name.
- The vermicelliA quarter pound of vermicelli, boiled separately and added at the end, is the one instruction worth obeying. Cooking the pasta in the broth clouds it with starch. "Let it boil well" after adding is a minute or two at most, otherwise the strands go slack.
- Skim the fatLamb shank throws a good deal of fat. Chill the strained broth and lift the solid cap, or blot the surface with paper; mutton fat on the tongue is what makes old-fashioned lamb broth taste heavy.
- YieldFour to six as a first course. The shank meat, pulled from the bone and shredded back into the pot, turns it into a main dish for four.
Vermicelli soup appears in many English-language household manuals of the nineteenth century, and its logic is economy: the knuckle and the veal scrap are the cheapest gelatinous cuts on the carcass, and the pasta stretches the result. Vermicelli, Italian for "little worms", was sold dried in long coils and prized precisely because it kept indefinitely in a store cupboard. The tablespoon of Halford or Worcestershire is a marker of the date: bottled table sauces were among the first branded, nationally advertised food products, and a recipe writer could name two competing brands and assume the reader had one of them on the shelf.