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Potage Spaghetti, Lucernoise
Prepare and strain a consomm in a saucepan, pour in one pint tomato sauce and let boil until required. Boil four ounces spaghetti in a quart water with half teaspoon salt ten minutes, remove, drain on sieve and cut in half-inch pieces; add to the consomm with a polenta quenelles garnishing prepared as below, boil ten minutes longer, pour the soup into a tureen and serve with two ounces grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear soup built on consommé and tomato sauce, thickened in effect by pasta and small polenta dumplings. The instructions assume a professional kitchen with stock and sauces already on hand.
- The missing quantityNo volume is given for the consommé. For 4 oz of spaghetti and a pint of tomato sauce, two quarts of consommé gives a soup rather than a stew; that is an inference, not something the original states.
- Polenta quenellesThe "prepared as below" garnish is not included in this excerpt; the wording suggests it followed immediately in the original text. Such quenelles are generally stiff cooked cornmeal, cooled, bound with egg and often cheese, shaped into small dumplings and poached or dropped into the simmering soup, though this recipe does not say so.
- Pasta timingTen minutes of boiling plus ten more in the soup will leave the spaghetti soft and the broth cloudy with released starch. Boil the pasta to just short of al dente, cut it, and add it in the last two or three minutes so it heats through and no more.
- Tomato sauceA period tomato sauce here means a cooked, sieved, lightly thickened sauce, not raw purée and not a seasoned pasta sauce. Canned passata reduced a little is the nearest equivalent; taste before salting, since consommé is already seasoned.
- ConsomméIf you are not clarifying your own, a good strong beef or veal stock, degreased and strained through a fine sieve or cloth, does the job. The clarity matters visually because this soup is served unthickened.
- The cheeseThe Parmesan is passed separately, as was usual with such soups; stirring grated cheese into a hot clear soup in the pot tends to make it string and cloud the broth. Pass it at the table.
- YieldOn the two-quart assumption above, about ten cups of soup once the pint of tomato sauce is added, or six to eight first-course servings.
The name follows the restaurant convention of tagging a garnish with a place: Lucernoise points to Lucerne, in central Switzerland. Cornmeal polenta had long been a staple of the Italian-speaking cantons and of northern Italy generally, so a soup that puts wheat pasta and maize dumplings in the same tureen with Parmesan brings the two traditions together. The recipe's shorthand — strain a consommé, pour in tomato sauce, refer to a garnish given elsewhere — is characteristic of books written by professional chefs for readers assumed to have stocks and mother sauces standing ready.