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Puree of Tomatoes, Aux Pates
Plunge three ounces Italian paste in a pint of boiling water with three saltspoons salt, boil ten minutes and drain on a sieve. Prepare a tomato puree but substitute Italian paste for the vermicelli, boil five minutes, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A two-line finishing recipe that assumes you already have the book's tomato pur everything hinges on the cross-reference and on not overcooking the pasta twice.
- It depends on another recipe"Prepare a tomato puree" points back to a tomato soup given earlier in the book, which this entry does not describe. Any smooth tomato soup will stand in; this page only tells you how to garnish it.
- Italian pastePeriod grocery shorthand for dried wheat pasta. The shape is not specified; since it stands in for vermicelli, a small soup shape (ditalini, tubetti, stelline, broken spaghetti) is the likely reading. Three ounces is roughly 3/4 cup of small shapes, enough to garnish rather than fill the bowl.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is 3/4 teaspoon — modest for pasta water. Salt to your own taste, keeping in mind the puree itself is already seasoned.
- A pint of water is tightThree ounces of pasta in two cups of water will cook unevenly and go starchy. Use a quart or more; draining on a sieve presumably serves to leave that starch behind rather than cloud the soup.
- The pasta is cooked twiceTen minutes boiling plus five more in the soup will take most small shapes past the point of collapse. Boil to just under al dente — often six or seven minutes for ditalini — then give it the brief simmer in the puree.
- Hold the pasta separate if not serving at oncePasta left standing in hot tomato soup keeps swelling and thickens the whole tureen. Cook it ahead, toss with a little oil, and add it to the bowls at the table if there will be any delay.
- YieldNo yield is given; three ounces of paste would suit roughly four to six first-course servings, depending on the volume of puree you started with.
The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised as a vast catalogue of variations — one base preparation followed by a dozen short entries that change a single element. This page is exactly that: the tomato purée stands, and vermicelli gives way to "Italian paste." That phrase was standard American grocery language well into the twentieth century, covering the whole family of dried Italian wheat pastes. It is why a garnish of tubetti turns up here under a French-styled title, aux pâtes.