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Tomato with Vermicelli
Melt in a saucepan one ounce butter, add one ounce finely chopped ham, one medium chopped carrot, one medium chopped onion, two branches parsley, one chopped leek, ten whole black peppers, one clove, one bay leaf, one saltspoon thyme. Mix well and brown nicely for fifteen minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Add one quart canned--or the equivalent of fresh crushed--tomatoes, with two and a half quarts white broth or water. Season with a level tablespoon salt and one light tablespoon sugar. If there be any bones on hand, either of beef or poultry, add them to the stock.
Cover the pan and let gently boil for one hour and fifteen minutes. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter and add two tablespoons flour. Mix well while browning for two minutes, then thicken the soup with this, continuing to mix with the wooden spoon while adding it. Boil for fifteen minutes longer and strain through a sieve into another saucepan. Boil one gill broken vermicelli in a pint of water for eight minutes. Drain well and add it to the soup. Boil again for five minutes. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A classic tomato soup built on a browned mirepoix and a blond roux, thinned with stock and finished with pasta. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and one of the timings need translation.
- A gill of vermicelliA gill is half a cup, so roughly 2 oz of broken vermicelli. Measure it dry and broken into short lengths, not coiled nests.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. One saltspoon of dried thyme is right for this volume of soup; a few fresh sprigs work equally well since everything is strained out.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock — veal, chicken or simply the water the recipe allows. It keeps the colour of the soup clean and red rather than muddy. Unsalted stock is essential here, because the recipe already calls for a full tablespoon of salt.
- Season at the end insteadA level tablespoon of salt into three and a half quarts of liquid is defensible with plain water, but with commercial broth it will be far too much. Add half, then correct after straining and reducing.
- Brown the vegetables properlyThe fifteen minutes of browning with the ham is where the depth comes from. Medium heat, occasional stirring, and let the onion and carrot take real colour before the tomatoes go in.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together for a couple of minutes so the raw taste goes, then whisk it into the hot soup a little at a time rather than dumping the soup onto the roux. The fifteen-minute boil afterwards is what clears the starchy edge.
- StrainingPush the solids through a sieve with a ladle rather than discarding them — that pulp is most of the body. A food mill does the job faster. Do not blend, or the soup turns pale and frothy.
- Cook the pasta separately, and add it lateBoiling the vermicelli apart keeps its starch out of the soup. Eight minutes plus five more in the soup will leave it very soft by modern taste; six minutes in water is closer, and add it to the tureen if the soup is not being served at once, since it will keep swelling.
- YieldRoughly three quarts finished — eight to ten servings as a first course.
Tomato soup thickened with a roux and garnished with a pasta is standard French classical practice: the aromatic base of ham, carrot, onion, leek and bay is a mirepoix in all but name, and the finish with vermicelli follows the old convention of naming a soup for its garnish, as in consommé vermicelli. Vermicelli — Italian for "little worms" — was long sold dried across Europe, reaching England before 1700, and became a familiar pantry item in English and American kitchens, often as a soup garnish though also in puddings. The instruction to throw in any beef or poultry bones on hand is a reminder of how these books were written for households with a stockpot in constant use, where soup was the destination for whatever the butcher's order had left behind.