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Vermicelli with Milk
Place two quarts milk in an enamelled pan with half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg and one ounce butter; then as soon as it comes to a boil strew in four ounces vermicelli, lightly mixing while adding it, and slowly simmer fifteen minutes. Dilute a tablespoon of arrowroot in half a gill of cream and two egg yolks, and add to the soup; sharply mix while cooking two minutes. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A milk soup thickened at the last minute with arrowroot and yolks. Two things decide whether it works: the pasta not turning to paste, and the yolk liaison not scrambling.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the arrowroot, cream and yolks go in, the soup must stay below a boil — a brisk simmer at most — for those two minutes. Boiling curdles the yolks into visible threads and also thins arrowroot back out, since it loses body with prolonged heat.
- Temper the yolks firstWhisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the cream-arrowroot-yolk mixture before it goes into the pan, then return the lot while stirring hard. The original's "sharply mix" is doing this work, but tempering makes it reliable.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so a scant quarter-teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup.
- Cut the fifteen minutesFifteen minutes is far longer than modern dried vermicelli wants; it is done in roughly 3 to 5 minutes and will break down into a starchy sludge if simmered that long. Add it, simmer until just tender, then proceed.
- Why enamelledThe instruction is not decorative. Bare iron or unlined copper discolours milk and gives it a metallic taste; enamel or heavy stainless steel, with a thick base, also gives you a fighting chance against scorching. Stir the bottom regularly.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts milk, 4 oz vermicelli (about 115 g), 1 oz butter (2 tablespoons), 1 tablespoon arrowroot. Cornstarch can stand in but sets cloudier and needs a full minute of gentle cooking to lose its raw taste.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will need thinning with hot milk if it stands.
Milk soups thickened with a yolk-and-cream liaison were standard first-course fare in the European kitchens Alexander Filippini drew on for The International Cook Book, and they are often said to have earned their place partly through the calendar: a soup with no meat stock behind it could be served on fast days and in Lent, when a consommé could not. Vermicelli is Italian for "little worms," a name attached to fine pasta since at least the Renaissance, when it was hand-rolled or drawn rather than machine-extruded, and by the time this book was compiled it was familiar in American kitchens as a dried pasta, coiled in nests, and commonly used in soup. The arrowroot is a period marker of its own — the powdered rhizome was a fashionable, easily digested thickener in the late nineteenth century, recommended for invalid cookery, and it gives a clearer, glossier body than the flour-and-butter thickening a French kitchen would have reached for.