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Tomato Soup
Slice two large onions into a saucepan, with two turnips, two carrots, and five or six outer sticks of celery. Put with these four ounces of lean ham cut into dice, and two ounces of fresh butter, and steam them over a gentle fire for half an hour. Pour over them two quarts of stock or liquor in which meat has been boiled, and add six or eight ripe tomatoes. Let all simmer gently together for a couple of hours. Rub the vegetables through a sieve, and boil them again with the liquor for a few minutes, add pepper and salt to taste, and serve very hot. Send bread toasted and cut into dice to table on a separate dish. A little tomato pulp may be added to any vegetable soup when the flavour is liked. Time, three to four hours. Probable cost, 6d. to 10d. per pint. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A late-Victorian purée soup built on a mirepoix and diced ham rather than cream or flour. The method is sound; only the vessels, timings and quantities need translating.
- "Steam them over a gentle fire"This means sweating the vegetables in the butter, covered, over low heat with no added liquid. Half an hour is not excessive — the aim is soft and sweet with no browning, which is what gives the finished soup its depth.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo imperial quarts is about 2.3 litres of stock; 4 oz ham is roughly 115 g, 2 oz butter about 55 g. Six to eight ripe tomatoes is perhaps 1½ to 2 lb / 700–900 g. The recipe gives it as sufficient for eight or ten persons.
- "Liquor in which meat has been boiled"The water from a boiled joint or a ham, which a kitchen of this sort would often have on hand. If you use ham stock or ham cooking liquid, hold the salt back until the very end; it is often salty enough on its own.
- The tomatoes are the variableVictorian tomatoes were generally smaller than most supermarket fruit and varied more in ripeness and flavour. If yours are pale, the soup will taste thin — good tinned plum tomatoes (a 400 g tin plus a pound of fresh) give a closer result than out-of-season fresh.
- Sieving"Rub through a sieve" is the whole texture of the dish: no cream, no roux, just puréed vegetable. A blender followed by a pass through a fine sieve is faster and closer to the intended smoothness. Do not skip the sieve — tomato skins and celery fibre survive a blender.
- Cut the simmering timeTwo hours of simmering may have been insurance against tough roots and thin stock. With a good stock, 45 minutes to an hour is enough; longer flattens the fresh tomato flavour, which is what you are after.
- The ham diceThey are seasoning rather than garnish; the recipe sends only the vegetables through the sieve, so the ham is largely left behind. If you want ham in the bowl, hold a little back and dice it small.
- Croûtons"Bread toasted and cut into dice" served separately was a common accompaniment to a purée soup, sent round so it stays crisp. Frying in butter is closer to modern taste, though the book specifies toasted.
Tomato soup appears in British cookery books through the second half of the nineteenth century as the tomato shifted from a suspect novelty to an ordinary vegetable — Cassell's places it among the plain purée soups rather than treating it as anything exotic, and the closing note that "a little tomato pulp may be added to any vegetable soup when the flavour is liked" reads like advice to cooks still getting used to it. The structure here is thoroughly French in descent: root vegetables and ham sweated in butter, moistened with stock, simmered and passed through a sieve, which is the classic purée soup of the period's professional kitchens. Note the costing, 6d. to 10d. a pint, a feature of Cassell's that seems to speak to the middle-class household keeping accounts; and note too the assumption that liquor from boiled meat was simply available, which tells you how such kitchens ran — nothing with flavour in it was thrown away.