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Another Tomato Soup
Take a rich bone of beef and have it broken. Put into a vessel with about five quarts of cold water. Let it boil steadily for one and a quarter hours. Then put in two dozen fine ripe tomatoes. Boil until the soup is reduced to two quarts. Wash the tomatoes, season to taste with salt and pepper, remove the meat and bones, then serve.
A two-ingredient beef-and-tomato broth that depends entirely on reduction for its body. The instructions are printed slightly out of order, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- The garbled line"Wash the tomatoes" appears after the boiling, where it makes no sense. It may be a misprint for "mash" — pressing the softened tomatoes and broth through a sieve to remove skins and seeds — though that is a conjecture. Either way, wash the tomatoes before they go in, and season after.
- The hinge: reduction, not thickeningThere is no flour, rice or cream here. All the body comes from boiling five quarts down to two, which concentrates both the gelatine from the bone and the tomato. Do not top up the pot part way through or you will end up with pink water.
- "A rich bone of beef"A marrow-rich shin or leg bone, sawn into sections by the butcher — "have it broken" means cracked open so the marrow can dissolve. A meaty shin cut of 2 to 3 lb gives a far better result than a bare bone.
- Boil steadily, or simmerA hard rolling boil emulsifies fat and scum into the stock and turns it cloudy and greasy. Hold it at a bare simmer instead, skimming the grey foam in the first twenty minutes, and accept that reducing five quarts to two will take several hours. The recipe times only the first stage — an hour and a quarter before the tomatoes go in — and leaves the reduction open.
- Two dozen tomatoesRoughly 6 to 8 lb; the field varieties usual at the time ran smaller than today's beefsteaks. Tinned whole peeled tomatoes with their juice stand in acceptably out of season, but you will need three or four 28 oz tins to come near the weight.
- Seasoning at the endSalt only after the reduction is complete. Salting five quarts to taste and then boiling it down to two gives a soup nobody can drink.
- YieldTwo quarts, that is eight cups — a first course for six. Chill the finished soup and lift the solid fat off the top before reheating.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are thick with tomato soups, and this one belongs to the older, plainer branch of the family: no roux, no milk, no stock made separately, just bone and fruit in one pot. Its presence in a household book as "another" tomato soup shows how ordinary the tomato had become — often said to have been distrusted in Anglo-American kitchens as a member of the nightshade family, though it was common in American cooking well before the end of the century, when a summer glut made recipes calling for two dozen at a time unremarkable. The technique is straight out of the household economy of the period: buy the cheap cracked bone the butcher would otherwise render, extract everything it has over several hours, and let the vegetable do the flavouring.