Home › Soups › Macaroni or Vermicelli Soup
Macaroni or Vermicelli Soup
Two small carrots, four onions, one small turnip, two cloves, one tablespoonful of salt; pepper to taste, herbs marjoram; parsley and thyme. Any cooked or uncooked meat. Put the soup bones in enough water to cover them; when they boil add the vegetables. Simmer three or four hours, then strain through a colander and put back in the saucepan to repeat. Boil one-half pound macaroni until quite tender, and place in the soup tureen, and pour the soup over it the last thing before serving. Vermicelli will only need to be soaked a short time- not boiled.
A plain nineteenth-century bone broth with the pasta cooked separately and dressed at the table. The recipe assumes you know how to run a stockpot, so the useful work here is filling in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: pasta never goes in the potMacaroni boiled in the broth clouds it and turns the whole thing starchy. Cook it in salted water, drain, put it in the warmed tureen, and pour the strained broth over at the last moment as directed.
- "Any cooked or uncooked meat" and soup bonesNo weight is given. Figure 2-3 lb of beef or veal marrow and knuckle bones to about 3 quarts of water; scraps of cooked meat were a way of using up yesterday's roast and are optional. Bones roasted first give a darker, rounder broth, which the original does not ask for.
- "Repeat" is ambiguousReturning the strained liquid to the pan to "repeat" most likely means reducing and re-seasoning it, since the vegetables and bones have been removed and there is nothing left to simmer. Read it as a further reduction to concentrate the broth, then taste for salt.
- That tablespoon of saltA full tablespoon into roughly 3 quarts of unreduced broth is defensible, but if you reduce afterward it will be too much. Add half at the start and correct at the end.
- HerbsNo quantities given. A bouquet of a few parsley stems, two or three thyme sprigs and a small sprig of marjoram, tied or bundled so it can be lifted out, is in keeping. Dried marjoram at about half a teaspoon does the same job.
- Skim, and skim againPeriod cooks took the grey scum off as it rose and the fat off once the broth was cool. Chilling the strained broth and lifting the solid fat cap gives the clear result the tureen service is meant to show off.
- Vermicelli has changedThe instruction to soak rather than boil suits the very fine, brittle, often nested vermicelli of the period. Modern dried vermicelli or thin spaghetti needs a short boil, two to four minutes; if you use fine nests or fideo, soaking in the hot broth for a few minutes still works.
- Half a pound of pasta is a lotWith 3 quarts of broth this feeds six to eight generously. Anything much less than that ratio and the tureen becomes a bowl of noodles with liquid in it.
Macaroni soup appears in many English-language household manuals of the nineteenth century, and its presence here says more about the availability of cheap dried pasta than about Italy. By the end of the nineteenth century American groceries carried macaroni and vermicelli as ordinary dry-goods staples, and cookbook writers slotted them into the existing framework of clear meat broths in place of barley, rice or sago. The method itself is straight out of the older tradition: bones and root vegetables simmered for hours, strained, reduced, served in a tureen.