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Consomme, with Italian Paste
Strain a consomme into another saucepan. Drop in two ounces Italian paste, boil slowly for fifteen minutes and serve.
A one-line garnish recipe of the kind that fills the soup chapters of pre-war hotel cookbooks: the consommé is assumed to exist already, and all that is described is what goes into it. A few gaps need filling before it works as written.
- "Italian paste"This is simply dried pasta, and in soup contexts means the small shapes sold now as pastina: stelline, acini di pepe, orzo, alphabets, or vermicelli broken short. Two ounces is about a third of a cup of small shapes, or a scant half cup of the lighter tubular ones.
- Unstated quantity of brothThe original never says how much consommé. Two ounces of pasta suits roughly 2 quarts, serving six to eight; much less liquid and the starch will cloud what should be a clear soup.
- Why the straining comes firstThe point of a consommé is clarity, and it must be strained through cloth before the pasta goes in, not after. Once the pasta is cooking it sheds starch continuously, so any later filtering is pointless.
- Fifteen minutes is too longSmall dried soup pasta is done in 5 to 8 minutes, and the fine vermicelli sorts in 3 or 4. Fifteen minutes of even a slow boil leaves the shapes swollen and collapsing and the broth thickened and dull.
- "Boil slowly"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely moving. A real boil agitates the pasta enough to break it up and turn the consommé murky, which defeats the whole dish.
- Cook separately if holdingPasta left standing in hot broth keeps absorbing it. If the soup is not going straight to the table, boil the paste in salted water, drain, and drop a spoonful into each hot bowl before ladling the consommé over.
- SeasoningConsommé is normally seasoned when it is made, but pasta absorbs salt as it swells. Taste again just before serving and correct.
Clear soup with a starch garnish was the backbone of the formal menu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookbooks of this sort list dozens of near-identical entries that differ only in what is dropped into the pot: consommé with rice, with tapioca, with royale custard, with vermicelli. The name of the garnish became the name of the course, which is why a recipe can consist of a single sentence and still be worth printing. "Italian paste" was one of the English terms in use for dried wheat pasta before the Italian names came into general use, and it seems to reflect the way the product reached Anglophone kitchens: as an imported dry good bought from a grocer, valued in this context less as a food in its own right than as a way of giving substance to an otherwise transparent broth.