Tomato Soup
Skim and strain one gallon of stock made from nice fresh beef; take three quarts tomatoes, remove skin and cut out hard center, put through a fine sieve, and add to the stock; make a paste of butter and flour, and, when the stock begins to boil, stir in half a tea-cup, taking care not to have it lumpy; boil twenty minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Two quarts canned tomatoes will answer. - Mrs. Col. Reid, Delaware.
A plain beef-and-tomato pottage of the kind that opened a Sunday dinner in the 1870s. It scales down easily, and the only real technique in it is getting the flour paste in without lumps.
- The hinge: the butter-flour pasteWork the softened butter and flour into a smooth paste (beurre manié) and whisk it into the simmering stock in small pinches, not a spoonful at a time. Dropped in as a lump it will set on the outside and never disperse.
- "Half a tea-cup" is ambiguousA tea-cup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about half a cup, though some run larger, so half of one is somewhere in the region of 1/4 cup of paste. For a gallon of stock, cream a couple of ounces of butter with an equal weight of flour, add part of it, and judge the body before adding more.
- Scale it downA gallon of stock plus three quarts of tomatoes yields something in the region of five quarts of soup, enough for a dozen or more. Quartering the recipe gives 1 quart stock, about 1 1/2 cups tomato puree and roughly 2 teaspoons each of butter and flour.
- Stock, skimmed and strainedChill the beef stock overnight and lift the solid fat off the top; that does the skimming better than any spoon. Strain through a fine sieve or cloth so the finished soup stays clear-bodied rather than gritty.
- The tomatoesThree quarts of fresh tomatoes is roughly 5 lb. Peeling is easiest after 30 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold; "cut out the hard center" means the pale core at the stem. Pressing through a fine sieve removes seeds as well as skin.
- Canned tomatoesTwo quarts of canned is presumably allowed for because canned tomatoes are already skinned and largely broken down, so less is needed. Two 28 oz cans, sieved or blitzed and strained, comes close; whole peeled are preferable to crushed, which often carries added puree and firming salts.
- Twenty minutes of boilingLong enough to cook out the raw taste of the flour, whatever the original reason, and it still serves. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil once the tomato is in, or the soup catches on the bottom and takes on a scorched edge.
- SeasoningSalt at the end. A gallon of homemade stock reduced for twenty minutes concentrates whatever salt is already in it, and canned tomatoes bring their own.
Tomato soup thickened with a flour-and-butter liaison sits at the point where the tomato was becoming a staple rather than a curiosity in American kitchens. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, appeared as commercial canning was making tomatoes a year-round ingredient — hence the offhand line that two quarts of canned will answer, which would have been a convenience rather than a compromise. The soup is built on beef stock, not cream: the smooth cream-of-tomato most Americans now picture came later, and the tinned condensed version later still (Campbell's from 1897). Mrs. Col. Reid of Delaware — presumably Delaware, Ohio — is one of many such attributions in the book, a reminder that these community cookbooks were compiled from what a particular town actually cooked.