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Tomato Soup (Can tomatoes or quart tomatoes)
1 can tomatoes, or 1 quart tomatoes peeled and cut in pieces. 2 slices onion. 2 sprays parsley.
Bit of bay leaf. 4 cloves. 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns.
Few gratings nutmeg. 3 tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons flour.
Salt, pepper, cayenne.
PROCESS: Cook the first six ingredients together twenty minutes. Rub through a purée strainer, keep hot. Melt butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir to a smooth paste, let cook one minute; dilute with tomato mixture to the consistency to pour. Combine mixtures and season with salt, a few grains cayenne and a grating of nutmeg. Reheat and serve with crisp, toasted Saratoga Wafers.
A plain tomato purée thickened with a butter-and-flour roux — no cream, no stock. The whole thing takes half an hour, and most of the work is in the straining.
- The can sizeCanned tomatoes came in several sizes in this period; the recipe's own alternative of a quart suggests a can of about that volume, so a 28 oz can is a reasonable substitute. The alternative given — a quart of fresh tomatoes, peeled and cut up — is about 2 lb.
- "The first six ingredients"Count them as tomatoes, onion, parsley, bay leaf, cloves and peppercorns. The nutmeg is held back and used at the end, where it is called for again.
- Purée strainerA food mill or a fine sieve worked with a ladle. This step is not optional: it removes the cloves, peppercorns, bay and parsley stems as well as the tomato seeds and skin. Do not use a blender in its place, since that would pulverise the whole spices into the soup.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour a full minute so it loses its raw taste, then add the hot purée gradually, whisking, rather than tipping it in at once. Adding hot liquid to a hot roux in stages is what keeps it smooth.
- Consistency"To the consistency to pour" means thin enough to run freely from the ladle — closer to heavy cream than to gravy. If the purée reduces too far, thin it with water or a light stock.
- Acid and scorchingTomato is acidic and the flour-thickened soup catches easily. Keep the heat moderate when reheating and stir the bottom of the pan. Avoid unlined aluminium or bare cast iron, which will take on a metallic edge.
- Saratoga WafersA thin, crisp wafer served alongside soup, toasted just before serving. Water crackers, oyster crackers or plain flatbread crackers, warmed in a 350F oven for a few minutes, do the same job.
- YieldNot stated. A quart of tomatoes cooked down and sieved, plus the roux, makes roughly 3 to 4 cups — four small first-course servings. It doubles without difficulty.
Elizabeth Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) belongs to the era when canned tomatoes had become so reliable and cheap that a February soup no longer depended on the garden — the recipe offers the can first and fresh fruit only as an alternative, which is a fair measure of how completely commercial canning had reshaped the winter kitchen. The dish itself is a cream-soup framework without the cream: a vegetable cooked with an onion and a bundle of whole spices, sieved, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux of the kind American cookbooks of the period simply called a white sauce. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book teaches nearly the same method. The accompaniment points to Saratoga Springs, New York, the resort town whose name attached itself in the nineteenth century to thin crisp things served with soup and drinks — the potato "Saratoga chip" being the survivor.