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Meatless Tomato Soup
One quart tomatoes, one of water; stew till soft; add tea-spoon soda, allow to effervesce, and add quart of boiling milk, salt, butter, and pepper to taste, with a little rolled cracker; boil a few minutes and serve. -Mrs. D..C. Conkey, Minneapolis, Minn.
A cream of tomato soup from the era before commercial condensed soup, using baking soda to keep the milk from curdling. The soda is the whole trick, and it is also the thing most easily overdone.
- Soda is the hingeThe teaspoon of soda neutralizes enough of the tomato acid that boiling milk can be added without breaking. Add it to the tomatoes off heat or at a bare simmer, let the foaming subside completely, then add the milk. Too much soda gives a flat, faintly soapy, metallic taste, so start with half a teaspoon and add more only if the milk shows signs of separating.
- QuantitiesOne quart of tomatoes means either fresh tomatoes stewed down or home-canned; a 28 oz can with its juice is close to the quart called for. One quart of water and one quart of milk gives something under three quarts of finished soup, enough for eight to ten as a first course.
- Stew till softWith canned tomatoes this is 15-20 minutes; with fresh, 25-30 until the pieces collapse. Many cooks will want to sieve or blend at this point, which the recipe does not ask for.
- Rolled crackerSoda crackers crushed fine with a rolling pin, used as the thickener in place of a flour roux. Two to three tablespoons is enough; more turns the soup pasty. Saltines work, and the salt they carry should be counted before seasoning.
- Boiling milkScald the milk separately and add it hot to hot soup. Cold milk poured into acidic tomato is the classic route to a curdled pot, soda or no soda.
- Boil a few minutes and serveOnce the milk is in, hold it just below a simmer. Hard boiling after the dairy goes in scorches the milk solids at the bottom of the pan and flattens the tomato flavor. Two or three minutes to warm through is plenty.
- MeatlessThe title signals that this soup uses no meat stock, where many soups of the period were built on one.
Buckeye Cookery (first published in 1877 in Marysville, Ohio, as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) was assembled from contributions by named women across the Midwest, which is why this soup carries Mrs. Conkey's name and her city. The soda trick it depends on was common household chemistry in the period: cooks knew that acid and milk fight, and that a pinch of saleratus or soda settled the argument, though the reason had to wait on a general understanding of protein coagulation. Cream of tomato soup itself is usually traced to the later nineteenth century, when home canning of tomatoes had made the fruit a year-round staple in American pantries; the Campbell's condensed version, which fixed the dish in the national memory, did not appear until 1897, two decades after recipes like this one were circulating in community cookbooks. The label "meatless" may suggest that a soup without meat stock was uncommon enough to be worth announcing.