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Vermicellini Tomate
Prepare a consomme, strain it into another saucepan, let boil for twenty minutes and pour in two gills tomato sauce. Break three ounces vermicellini (very small vermicelli) and add to the consomme, then boil for ten minutes, pour consomme into a soup tureen and send to table with two ounces grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear soup finished with tomato and fine pasta, from the era when the consommé itself was assumed knowledge and only the garnish got written down. Two things need attention: the missing broth quantity and the pasta timing.
- Quantity of consomméThe original never says how much, which is the recipe's real gap. Three ounces of fine pasta and two gills of tomato sauce suit roughly 2 quarts of consommé, serving six to eight; less broth than that and you have a thickened tomato soup rather than a clear one.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz in American measure, so two gills is one cup; under the British gill of 5 fl oz it would be a cup and a quarter. Use a smooth, thin sauce — a chunky modern pasta sauce will cloud the consommé and sink.
- VermicelliniThe parenthesis is the whole definition: very fine vermicelli. Capellini or angel hair broken into short lengths works, as does any fine soup pasta such as fedelini or filini. Avoid egg noodles, which shed starch.
- The ten-minute boilPasta this thin cooks in three to four minutes. Ten will leave it soft and swollen, and the starch it releases will dull a consommé you took trouble to clarify. Add the pasta at the last moment and taste at three minutes.
- Boiling the consommé twenty minutesThe recipe gives no reason for this step. Whatever the intent, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil; hard boiling breaks up any remaining fine particles and turns a clear broth hazy.
- Parmesan served separatelyThe recipe sends the cheese to table in its own dish; grated hard cheese stirred straight into the tureen tends to clump and cloud. Two ounces, freshly grated, is generous for eight.
- ServingBring it to table promptly. The pasta keeps absorbing broth in the tureen, so a soup that was correct in the pot can be sluggish ten minutes later.
Pasta in clear broth is one of the oldest and plainest uses of dried pasta in Italian cooking, and the diminutive names in this recipe describe nothing but size: vermicelli means "little worms," and vermicellini is smaller still. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international cookbooks reproduced dozens of these consommés — with pasta, with royale custard, with vegetables cut in shapes — the clear broth was the measure of a competent kitchen and the garnish was what gave each version a menu name. Tomato sauce itself was no novelty — it appears in Italian printed sources from the late seventeenth century, in Latini's collection of 1692, and in eighteenth-century books — but it was over the course of the nineteenth century that it became a routine larder item in professional kitchens, and a cup of it stirred into clear broth was a quick way to give a soup both colour and acidity. The Parmesan is sent to table separately, an arrangement often said to reflect the ordinary service of the period.