Italian Soup
Cook 1/2 pint of fine cornmeal-they call it semolina in Italy-with 1 ounce butter, 1 quart white stock, salt, pepper, and nutmeg for 1 hour. Add some parsley, stir and strain it, then add the yolk of an egg, blended with 1/2 pint hot milk. Serve with grated Parmesan cheese and croutons.
A thickened semolina soup of the type Italians call semolino in brodo, written down by an English-speaking traveller who got one key detail wrong. Read the first point before shopping.
- Semolina is not cornmealThe parenthesis in the original is a mistake: semolina is coarsely milled durum wheat, while cornmeal is maize. Italian semolino soups are made with the wheat product, which cooks to a smooth pale cream. Use fine semolina; cornmeal will give you a grainy polenta soup with a quite different flavour.
- Half a pint of semolinaThat is a volume measure of dry grain, roughly 1 cup or about 6 oz. Against 1 quart of stock this makes a very stiff porridge rather than a soup, which is why the milk arrives later. If you want a spoonable soup rather than a spooning-stands-up one, start with half that quantity of semolina.
- An hour is far too longFine semolina is fully cooked and thickened in 10 to 15 minutes of gentle simmering with regular stirring. An hour here only risks scorching the bottom of the pan and evaporating the stock away.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock made from veal or chicken bones, with the aromatics kept pale. Any light chicken stock does the job; avoid a dark roasted-bone stock, which will muddy the colour the dish depends on.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain most likely serves to catch lumps and the parsley rather than to remove the grain. Push it through a coarse sieve or simply whisk well; a fine chinois will hold back the semolina itself.
- The egg yolkPull the pan off the heat, whisk the yolk into the hot milk, then stir that into the soup and keep it below a simmer. Boiling after the yolk goes in will curdle it into threads.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained pinch. With butter, milk and Parmesan, nutmeg is doing the same work it does in a bechamel, and pre-ground nutmeg reads as dusty.
- YieldAs written, four generous servings; six as a first course once the milk is in.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the travelling American or British cook collecting dishes abroad and rendering them for a home kitchen, often at second hand and with the odd wire crossed, as the cornmeal-for-semolina slip here shows. The dish itself is a version of semolino in brodo, one of the plainest and most durable things in the Italian repertoire, still made for children and convalescents, and dressed up here in the French manner with an egg-yolk-and-milk liaison and croutons. Semolina, the coarse middlings left when durum wheat is milled, is the same grain that gives dried pasta its bite. The Parmesan on top points to a northern Italian inspiration.