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Bean and Tomato Soup
Soak a quart of beans eight hours. Drain, and soak in warm water for another hour. Drain, and put into the soup-pot with a gallon of cold water; bring to a boil slowly. Add a half pound of chopped fat salt pork with 2 sliced onions and a bay leaf. Simmer gently for four hours. Then press and run the soup through a sieve. Return to the pot with a quart of canned tomatoes, and sweeten with 2 teaspoonfuls of granulated sugar. Boil half an hour, strain the soup through a colander, and place over the fire. Thicken it with a tablespoonful of flour rubbed into the same quantity of butter. Boil up once, and serve.
A long-simmered dried bean puree stretched with canned tomato and finished with beurre manie. The quantities are large by modern standards and the method assumes an all-day pot on the back of a coal range.
- YieldA quart of dried beans and a gallon of water yields roughly 4 to 5 quarts of finished soup, enough for 10 to 12 servings. Halve it for a household batch.
- Which beansUnspecified. A soup meant to be pressed through a sieve to a smooth puree points to dried white beans (navy or pea beans), which break down readily, but the recipe does not say.
- The double soakThe recipe calls for an eight-hour cold soak followed by an hour in warm water. One overnight soak does the same work; the warm rest does no harm but is not necessary.
- Salt porkHalf a pound of fat salt pork is both the fat and the salt in the dish. Add no further salt until the soup has been sieved and tasted.
- Simmer timeFour hours is generous for soaked white beans; they will collapse in 90 minutes to 2 hours on a modern burner. Cook until the beans crush easily against the side of the pot, then sieve.
- Sieving twiceThe recipe passes the soup through a sieve, then again through a colander after the tomatoes. A food mill or a blender followed by one pass through a fine sieve gives the same texture.
- Tomatoes and sugarTwo teaspoons of sugar is presumably there to soften the acidity of the canned tomatoes. Taste before adding it; it may not be needed.
- The thickeningA tablespoon each of flour and butter rubbed together is a beurre manie, whisked into the hot soup. It must boil once to cook out the raw flour taste.
Dried beans and salt pork were the standing winter provision of the American household, and a bean soup was the cheapest hot dish a cook could set on the table. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century rather than earlier is the quart of canned tomatoes: commercial tomato canning expanded enormously in the United States after the Civil War, and by the time consolidated household libraries like this one were compiled, a tin of tomatoes was an everyday pantry item rather than a luxury. The sieving reflects a broader taste of the period, borrowed from French practice, for smooth strained soups.