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Vermicelli, Hollandaise
Prepare a chicken broth and strain it into a saucepan. Break three ounces good vermicelli on a plate and add it to broth with a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, then let boil for fifteen minutes. Dilute two egg yolks on a plate with one gill cream, the juice of half a lemon and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Add it to soup, mix while heating for three minutes, remove, pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear chicken soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything depends on the last three minutes.
- Never let it boil after the liaison goes inOnce the yolks and cream are stirred in, hold the soup below a simmer — around 170-180F. A boil will scramble the yolks into threads and the soup cannot be brought back.
- Temper firstThe instruction to "dilute" the yolks on a plate with cream, lemon and nutmeg is the whole safeguard. Whisk a ladle of the hot broth into that mixture before it meets the pot, then return it off the heat.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Heavy cream stands up to the lemon juice better than light.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground has little to give here.
- Fifteen minutes is too long for the pastaModern vermicelli or capellini is done in 4-6 minutes and will turn to paste in fifteen. Boil the broth alone, then add the pasta near the end.
- Add the parsley lateA quarter hour of boiling leaves chopped parsley grey and flavourless. Stir it in with the liaison instead.
- Broth quality carries the dishA well-reduced, properly seasoned chicken stock, strained clear through a fine sieve, is the difference between this and hot water with noodles.
- YieldThree ounces of vermicelli and two yolks suit roughly six cups of broth — four to six servings as a first course.
The name is not a mistake for the sauce: in the French kitchen vocabulary that ran through American hotel cookery around 1900, à la hollandaise applied to a soup indicated a finish of egg yolks, cream and lemon rather than the emulsified butter sauce, and other clear broths were given the same treatment. Vermicelli is Italian for "little worms," a name attached to fine extruded pasta since at least the Renaissance; by the time this book was compiled, dried vermicelli was a familiar grocery item in American cities and turns up frequently as a soup garnish. The combination — Italian pasta, French liaison, an English-language hotel cookbook — is the kind of borrowing that a volume calling itself The International Cook Book existed to collect, and the egg-yolk liaison is among the older thickening methods in European cookery.