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Spaghetti with Cream
Mix in saucepan one ounce butter with two ounces flour, set pan on fire and stir continually with a wooden spoon for five minutes, then pour in two quarts white broth sharply mix with whisk until it comes to boiling point, add two branches chives, lightly mix and let simmer for thirty minutes. Boil two ounces spaghetti in a pint water with half teaspoon salt for fifteen minutes, drain on sieve and cut spaghetti in half-inch-long pieces. Strain soup through Chinese strainer into another saucepan, add spaghetti and season with a good teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne, lightly mix and let again come to a boil. Mix in a bowl a gill cream, half ounce butter and a half ounces grated Parmesan cheese, add to soup, mix while heating for two minutes but do not allow to boil, pour soup in a tureen and serve.
Despite the title, this is a soup: a flour-thickened cream soup with short-cut spaghetti as the garnish, finished with Parmesan off the boil. It scales down easily, since two quarts of broth to two ounces of pasta is a very light hand.
- It is a soup, not a pasta dishThe finished quantity is roughly two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. Serve it in warmed bowls or the tureen the recipe calls for; there is only about a quarter of an ounce of spaghetti per person.
- White brothA pale, unbrowned stock — veal, chicken, or a mix — with no roasted bones and no tomato. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in perfectly; because the soup is seasoned late and finished with salty Parmesan, start with stock that is undersalted.
- The roux must not colourFive minutes of stirring over the heat is meant to cook out the raw flour taste while keeping the paste blond. Keep the heat moderate and stop the moment it smells faintly of biscuit; any browning will tint the finished soup.
- Gill, saltspoon, Chinese strainerA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which with cayenne is assertive — add half and taste. A "Chinese strainer" is a chinois; a fine-mesh sieve does the same work, and the point of it is to catch the chives and any flour lumps.
- Ambiguous quantities"Two branches chives" is not a modern measure; a small bundle of six or eight stalks, tied so they can be fished out or strained off, matches the intent. "A half ounces grated Parmesan cheese" is garbled in the original — an ounce and a half of grated Parmesan is the reading that gives a balanced finish.
- The hinge: no boiling after the liaisonOnce the cream, butter and cheese go in, the soup must stay below a simmer. Boiling curdles the cream and strings the Parmesan into rubbery threads on the surface. Two minutes of gentle heat, stirring, is all it needs — and it cannot be reheated hard afterwards either.
- Pasta timingFifteen minutes will leave modern dried spaghetti soft. Cook it to just past al dente, around nine or ten minutes, since it will sit in hot soup and continue to swell. Cut the drained strands into half-inch lengths as directed; long spaghetti in a spoonable soup is unmanageable.
- ThicknessTwo ounces of flour to two quarts of broth gives a soup that lightly coats a spoon, not a sauce. If it thickens more than you want during the thirty-minute simmer, thin it with a little more hot broth before straining.
Creamed soups garnished with a starch — rice, barley, tapioca, vermicelli, spaghetti — were a fixture of the professional repertoire. The structure here is textbook: a white roux, white stock, a long slow simmer, a straining, then a *liaison* of cream, butter and cheese added off the boil, the same finishing move used in French potages. What is telling is the spaghetti itself. It is treated as a convenient ingredient to be dropped into a familiar format rather than cooked as Italians cooked it — hence the instruction to boil it fifteen minutes, then chop it into half-inch lengths so it would behave in a soup spoon. The Parmesan is the one genuinely Italian gesture in the dish, and it is used exactly as a French cook would use it: stirred in at the end, for depth rather than for stringiness.