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Italian Paste with Milk
Boil a quart and a half milk in a saucepan with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and half saltspoon ground nutmeg, adding two ounces Italian paste with an ounce of butter; let slowly boil for fifteen minutes. Dilute one egg yolk in a tablespoon cream and add to the milk; gently mix while heating, without boiling, for two minutes. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve with one ounce grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A thin milk soup thickened with small pasta and finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Nearly everything that can go wrong here happens in the last two minutes.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer — around 180F. A boil scrambles the yolk into threads and the soup turns grainy. Temper the yolk with a ladle of hot milk before it goes into the pan.
- "Italian paste"A period catch-all for dried pasta. For a milk soup of this kind use a small soup shape — pastina, stelline, ditalini, or vermicelli broken short.
- QuantitiesA quart and a half is 6 cups milk; 2 oz pasta is a scant half cup of small shapes. This is deliberately a brothy soup, not a macaroni dish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon of nutmeg is about an eighth of a teaspoon. Grate it fresh.
- ScorchingMilk with no water in it catches on the bottom of the pan quickly. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan, keep the heat low, and stir along the base rather than just swirling the surface.
- The fifteen minutesThat is long for modern pastina, which cooks in five to seven. The extra time is doing a second job — releasing starch to body the milk — so either accept softer pasta or cook it to your liking and give the soup a few minutes' rest off direct heat.
- Cheese served separatelyParmesan stirred into hot milk tends to clump and string. Passing it at the table, as written, is the better method; grate it fine.
- YieldRoughly four as a first course, or three as a light supper. It thickens as it stands and will need loosening with more hot milk if held.
"Italian paste" was a common English-language term in the nineteenth century for what we now simply call pasta — pasta means dough, and the older trade word paste carried the same sense. Dried pasta cooked in milk rather than water belongs to a large family of Italian minestre — pastina in brodo, pastina al latte — long associated with children, invalids and light evening meals, and still made that way in Italian homes. The egg-yolk-and-cream liaison and the tureen with grated cheese passed separately are professional dining-room conventions applied to what is, at bottom, a nursery soup.