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Potage with Noodles, Sardaigne
Prepare a noodle paste and roll it out as thin as possible on a lightly floured table. Let rest for five minutes, then cut paste into even lozenge pieces, drop into two parts boiling water and cook for ten minutes. Thoroughly drain on a sieve, place in a saucepan with one quart and a half broth and one pint tomato sauce, add a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and the leaves of two branches chervil. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix, let boil for twenly-five minutes, then pour potage into soup tureen and serve with a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A pasta-in-broth soup written in the French kitchen shorthand of its day. The one thing to fix is the timing: ten minutes of boiling followed by another twenty-five in the broth will reduce fresh noodles to paste.
- Cut the cooking shortFresh rolled noodles need one to three minutes in boiling water, not ten. Simmer the broth and tomato sauce together for the twenty-five minutes to marry the flavours, then add the drained pasta for the last two or three minutes only.
- "Noodle paste"The period term for fresh egg pasta dough: flour, egg, a little salt and water, kneaded firm and rested. Roughly 8 oz flour to 2 eggs will make enough for this quantity.
- "Two parts boiling water"Ambiguous as written. Read it as a generous pot of well-salted water — several quarts — rather than any fixed ratio.
- LozengesDiamond shapes cut from the rolled sheet, the standard French soup-pasta cut. Cut them from a sheet rolled thin enough to see the board through.
- Liquid and yieldA quart and a half of broth plus a pint of tomato sauce is about eight cups, serving six as a first course. Use a light chicken or beef broth; canned passata stands in for the period's cooked tomato sauce.
- Season at the endA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper assumes an unsalted homemade broth. With commercial stock, salt only after the soup has boiled down.
- ChervilTwo branches means two sprigs, leaves stripped. If you cannot find it, use a little tarragon plus extra parsley; chervil's anise note is faint and easily lost, so add it off the heat.
- ParmesanPassed separately at the table, as the original insists — grated into the soup in the pot it will clump and thicken the broth.
"Sardaigne" is simply French for Sardinia, and the title shows how thoroughly the professional kitchen of the period ran on French naming conventions: an Italian soup of egg noodles, broth, tomato and Parmesan is filed as a potage and given a geographical tag, the same habit that produced dishes labelled apolitaine or Piemontaise on hotel menus of the time. How much such names owed to actual regional cooking varied; they were often a chef's cataloguing device rather than a claim of provenance, and lozenge-cut noodles in broth are common to much of Italy rather than specific to the island. Small soup-pasta shapes of this kind are a long-standing way of using the scraps left from rolling sheets. Books of this sort were aimed at American cooks and hotel staff who wanted the international repertoire without travelling for it, at a time when Parmesan and Italian pasta were becoming more widely available in eastern US cities through import grocers.