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Potage Aux Pates, Tomate
Prepare and strain the consomme into another saucepan, add a pint of tomato sauce and boil fifteen minutes. Then add three ounces Italian paste and boil again twenty-five minutes. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A brief entry that assumes you have already made the book's consommé and its tomato sauce; the instructions here are only the finishing. The one thing to change is the pasta timing.
- Twenty-five minutes is far too longThree ounces of dried Italian pasta in simmering broth is done in 8-12 minutes depending on the shape. Twenty-five minutes gives you a starchy, collapsed soup. Add the pasta near the end and cook it just to the point of tenderness.
- "Italian paste"Period English for dried pasta, usually the small soup shapes -- vermicelli broken short, ditalini, stelline, alphabets. Three ounces is about ¾ cup of small shapes, weighed rather than measured.
- The consommé is a separate recipeThe consommé is a separate recipe -- This is a finishing formula, not a whole soup. It assumes a quantity of clarified consommé made elsewhere in the book; the recipe itself never states how much. A good unsalted beef or chicken stock, degreased and strained, stands in fine.
- Tomato sauce, not passataThe tomato sauce of this era is a cooked, seasoned, usually roux-thickened sauce, not plain crushed tomatoes. A pint of it will thicken and tint the consommé noticeably. If you use plain tomato purée, expect a thinner and sharper result.
- Skim after the first boilBoiling tomato sauce into consommé throws a scum and clouds the clarity you worked for. Simmer rather than boil the fifteen minutes and skim, or the point of using consommé is lost.
- Cook the pasta separately if it must holdPasta left in the tureen keeps swelling and drinks the broth. For anything but immediate service, boil it apart, drain, and put it in the tureen with the hot soup poured over.
- Yield and seasoningThe recipe gives no quantity of consommé, so yield depends on what you start with; two quarts would serve 6-8 as a first course. Salt at the end -- the consommé and the sauce both contribute, and forty minutes of boiling concentrates whatever is already there.
Potage aux pâtes, tomate is a line from the classical French repertoire's system of garnished clear soups, where a single well-made consommé was varied endlessly by what went into it: a vegetable brunoise, a royale custard, tapioca, rice, or as here, pasta and tomato. The naming convention -- the base first, the garnish after -- is what lets a book like this compress a soup into three sentences and assume the cook has the consommé and the tomato sauce already standing. That "Italian paste" appears in a French-titled soup reflects how thoroughly dried pasta had been absorbed into professional European kitchens by the turn of the twentieth century, long before it was an everyday American pantry item.