Tomato Soup
Boil twenty minutes; add one teaspoonful baking soda and one quart of sweet milk, a piece of butter size of an egg, salt and pepper to taste. Thicken with a little flour and strain before serving. Delicious. -Mrs. E. A. B. CREAM SOUP (GREEN PEAS).
Pour off the water from a can of green peas, put the peas in a pot with enough water to cover them, season with salt, let them cook a few minutes and mash through a fine sieve. Take a tablespoonful of butter and two of flour, melt them together and let cook until they look frothy and bubble; then pour in one pint of sweet milk and one pint of water; season with Tabasco pepper and salt. Let it boil a minute and add the peas which have been put through the seive, and let all boil just a minute and serve. -Mrs. E. A. B. CREAM SOUP (TOMATOES).
Make a cream soup the same as the above. Take a small can of tomatoes, rub through a seeve, then put them on to cook with two blades of mace, a grate or two of nutmeg, salt and red pepper and a very small pinch of soda. Let boil for five or ten minutes, and while boiling hot pour in the creamsoup that has been prepared. Let come to a boil and then serve. Very nice.
Three related soups sit here, all built on the same principle: an acidic vegetable purée neutralised with a pinch of soda so that milk can be added without curdling. That trick is the whole point of the method.
- Why the sodaTomatoes are acidic enough to clot hot milk on contact. A scant quarter teaspoon of baking soda per quart of tomato purée is plenty to blunt that; a full teaspoonful will foam violently and leave a soapy, flat taste. Modern practice is to skip the soda and instead add the hot tomato to the hot milk base gradually, off the boil.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for plain fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole as flat "blades" or ground. Conversions vary between sources; two blades is somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace. Add it to the simmering tomato and strain it out if using whole.
- Red pepper and Tabasco"Red pepper" here means ground cayenne, not paprika or sweet pepper. Use a pinch. The recipe's "Tabasco pepper" may mean the bottled sauce, commercially available from the late 1860s, or the ground pepper itself; if using the sauce, a few drops.
- The pea soup rouxCooking the butter and flour until it looks "frothy and bubble" means a white roux, one to two minutes, no colour. Add the milk and water gradually and whisk to avoid lumps.
- Canned peasCanned peas of the period were probably softer and starchier than today's, though the recipe says nothing of it. Frozen peas cooked three minutes and puréed give a fresher result; press through a sieve, or blend and sieve to remove skins.
- StrainingOnly the first, fragmentary recipe instructs straining before serving; the tomato soup asks merely that the tomatoes be rubbed through a sieve. Straining the finished soup would remove seeds, skin and the whole mace blades.
- YieldThe pea and tomato soups each work out at roughly a quart and a half, serving four to six as a first course. Serve at once.
Cream of tomato was a new fashion when this book was compiled. Canned tomatoes had become cheap and reliable in American groceries after the Civil War, and the soda trick that let cooks marry that acidity to fresh milk seems to have circulated in community cookbooks before condensed tomato soup arrived on shop shelves and made the problem someone else's. The contributor's initials attached to all three entries point to the collective nature of these volumes: church and club members submitted family formulas, which explains why one recipe frankly instructs the reader to "make a cream soup the same as the above" rather than repeating itself. The velvet roux base, milk and water rather than stock, and the whisper of mace and nutmeg all descend from the French white sauce tradition as it reached American home cooks through mid-century domestic manuals.