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Vermicelli Au Gratin
Gently break ten ounces vermicelli on a plate, boil in a saucepan one pint white broth, add the vermicelli; season with a light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, then let boil for fifteen minutes, stirring at the bottom frequently. Stir in one ounce grated Parmesan cheese, add half a gill cream, one-half ounce butter and one egg yolk. Sharply mix with a wooden spoon for one minute, transfer the vermicelli into a baking dish. Sprinkle over a little Parmesan cheese, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, then set in the oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A pasta gratin cooked risotto-style in broth rather than drained water, so the starch thickens the sauce. Nearly everything here works as written; the measures and the egg yolk need a word.
- Vermicelli, not the rice noodleThis means the thin Italian wheat pasta, sold coiled in nests or as long strands. The translucent rice vermicelli of Southeast Asian cooking will collapse in fifteen minutes of simmering.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. The half ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Three saltspoons of pepperA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, making roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for ten ounces of pasta. That is assertive but deliberate in this kind of dish; scale back if you like.
- White brothA pale unbrowned stock, chicken or veal. One pint to ten ounces of pasta is a tight ratio and the pasta will drink nearly all of it, which is the point; keep more warm broth at hand in case it goes dry before the pasta is tender.
- Stirring the bottomWith this little liquid the pasta will catch and scorch. Frequent stirring is not optional, and a heavy-bottomed pan helps more than a low flame.
- The egg yolkTake the pan off the heat before it goes in, and work fast with the wooden spoon. Off-heat mixing keeps the yolk from setting into threads while it still binds the sauce.
- OvenThe instruction gives no heat. Ten minutes only warms and glazes an already cooked dish, so use a hot oven, 425F, or run it under the broiler for two or three minutes to brown the cheese.
- YieldTen ounces of pasta serves three or four as a main course, six as a side or first course.
This is pasta treated the way a professional French kitchen of the period treated it: simmered in broth, finished with cheese, cream, butter and a yolk, then gratinated. Escoffier and his contemporaries codified a family of such dishes, and the technique of cooking pasta directly in its liquid is closer to Italian practice for pastina and risotto than to the boil-and-drain method. Vermicelli, whose name means "little worms," was one of the earliest dried pastas to travel widely in Europe and appears in English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, usually in soups.