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Tomato Bisque
2 Cupfuls Canned, Sifted Tomatoes 3½ Tablespoonfuls Flour Heat the tomato and thicken it with the Snowdrift and flour rubbed together.
Then add the soda and seasonings, and the milk, heated. Serve with Snowdrift Croutons. ¼ Teaspoonful Baking Soda 2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1 Teaspoonful Salt 1/2 Teaspoonful Onion Juice ¼ Teaspoonful Celery Salt 1½ Cupfuls Milk
A cream-of-tomato soup built on a roux made with shortening rather than butter, from a cookbook published to promote Snowdrift brand shortening. The ingredient list runs together with the method, so read it through before you start.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold from the early 1900s (hydrogenated versions came later). Substitute butter tablespoon for tablespoon.
- Fractions in the amountsThe quantities printed as "14 Teaspoonful" are quarter-teaspoons, and "1½ Cupfuls Milk" is a cup and a half. "312 Tablespoonfuls" of flour is the same artefact and reads 3½ tablespoonfuls, thickening 3½ cups of liquid (2 cups tomato plus 1½ cups milk) with 2 tablespoons of fat.
- The hinge: the sodaThe baking soda is there to neutralise enough acid in the tomato that the milk will not curdle. Stir it into the hot thickened tomato and let it foam out before the milk goes in; too much soda leaves a soapy, flat taste.
- Adding the milkHeat the milk separately and add it to the tomato, not the reverse, and keep the pan below a boil once combined. A hard boil will break the soup even with the soda in it.
- Onion juiceMade by halving an onion and scraping the cut face, or by grating it and pressing the pulp. A teaspoon of grated onion pressed through a fine sieve is the same thing.
- Canned sifted tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period were whole or broken in thin juice, and "sifted" means pressed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Two cups of tomato passata or of canned tomatoes blended and strained is the equivalent.
- CroutonsThe Snowdrift croutons are simply small bread cubes fried in the shortening. Butter or oil in a skillet, or cubes tossed in fat and baked at 375F until crisp, serve the same purpose.
- YieldAbout 3½ cups finished soup — two generous bowls or four small first-course cups.
Snowdrift was a brand of hydrogenated cottonseed shortening marketed in the American South by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book, like Crisco's contemporaneous pamphlets, exists to demonstrate that the product could stand in for butter and lard in every course of a meal — hence shortening in the roux of a cream soup, where a cook of the era would have reached for butter without thinking. The soup itself belongs to a family of "bisques" that had drifted well away from the word's earlier senses, which in French usage covered game-bird soups as well as shellfish purées; by 1900 American cookbooks used bisque loosely for any thickened, milk-enriched soup, and tomato was the most popular of them, made practical year-round by the canned tomato industry that grew up after the Civil War. The pinch of soda is the period's standard defence against curdling, a trick that seems to appear chiefly in the later nineteenth century, and its presence here is a useful hint at a pre-1920s recipe.