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Tomato Soup
One quart can of tomatoes; two heaping tablespoons of flour, one of butter, one teaspoon of salt, one of sugar, a pint of hot water. Let the tomatoes and water come to a boil; rub flour, butter and tablespoon of tomato together, stir into the boiling mixture, add seasoning and boil all together fifteen minutes; rub through a sieve and serve with bread dice.
— Mrs. George S. Harding
A plain flour-thickened tomato soup of the kind that filled the soup course before canned condensed soup existed. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are about the can and the strainer.
- The canA "quart can of tomatoes" is roughly 32 oz, so use two standard 14.5 oz cans of whole or diced tomatoes with their juice, or a 28 oz can plus a splash more. Whole peeled tomatoes give a better texture through the sieve than diced, which are treated with calcium chloride to stay firm.
- A pint of hot waterTwo cups, which makes a thin soup by modern standards. Light stock in place of the water, or holding back half a cup, gives more body without changing the method.
- The beurre maniéRubbing flour and butter together cold with a spoonful of tomato is the hinge of the recipe. Work it into a smooth paste before it goes near the pot, and stir it in off the hardest boil, or you will be sieving out flour lumps rather than tomato skins.
- Fifteen minutes is not too longUnlike delicate ingredients, a raw flour thickening genuinely needs this time to lose its pasty taste. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir the bottom, since a floury tomato soup scorches readily.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" removes seeds and skin. A blender or immersion blender will smooth the soup but leaves the seeds in; for the intended texture, blend and then pass through a fine mesh strainer.
- AcidityThere is no milk or cream in the soup (only the spoonful of butter), which sidesteps the curdling problem. If you add cream at the end, take the pot off the heat and temper it in, or the tomato acid will break it.
- Bread diceSmall cubes of stale bread, fried in butter or dried in a 350F oven until crisp. Cut them about a third of an inch so they hold up in the bowl.
- YieldAbout five cups, or four modest first-course servings. The teaspoon of sugar was probably meant to round out the acidity of the canned tomatoes; taste before adding it and adjust the salt at the end.
Canned tomatoes were among the first commercially successful American canned goods, widespread and cheap by the 1870s, and they turned tomato soup from a late-summer dish into a year-round one. A recipe like this, credited to a contributor under her married name, was a reliable, inexpensive opener that a household could produce from the pantry shelf. The thickening technique — flour and butter rubbed cold into a paste and stirred into boiling liquid — is the plain-cooking cousin of a French roux, and it appears often in nineteenth-century American cookery, needing no separate pan and no timing skill. Condensed canned tomato soup, which arrived commercially at the turn of the century, would eventually make homemade versions like this one a matter of choice rather than routine.