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Tomato and Bean Soup
Pour 3 pints of cold water over beef-bones and place on the fire. Add half a sliced carrot, 2 stalks of refuse celery, and a grated onion. Simmer slowly for four hours in a covered pot, until the liquid is reduced to one-half. Turn all into a bowl and let it stand until it becomes cold. Skim the fat off, take out the bones and rub the vegetables through a colander back into the liquor.
Season to taste with salt and pepper. When it begins to boil, add a cupful of stewed tomato and one of baked beans. After cooking half an hour rub all hard through the colander into another saucepan. Thicken with a teaspoonful of butter rubbed with 1 of flour. A little chopped parsley is an improvement. Boil hard for a moment and turn upon small squares of fried or toasted bread laid in the bottom of the tureen. This is a fine way to use up left-overs of stewed tomatoes and baked beans.
A thrifty puree built on a long-simmered bone broth, with yesterday's stewed tomatoes and baked beans doing the work of a thickener. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions assume a cook who is reducing stock by half and pushing everything through a sieve twice.
- The reduction is the recipeThree pints of water on beef bones must come down to about a pint and a half over four hours at a bare tremble. Keep it barely moving; a rolling boil will cloud the broth and drive off the volume too fast to develop any flavour.
- "Refuse celery"The tough outer ribs, leaves and root end that were trimmed off for the table. Two stalks' worth of trimmings, leaves included, is the intent.
- Cooling and skimmingThe stand is only there to set the fat into a cap you can lift off; the recipe asks simply that it become cold. Chill it in the refrigerator rather than leaving it out on the counter, and use it within a couple of days.
- BonesMarrow and knuckle bones give body; ask a butcher for a mix. Roasting them first is not in the original and will change the character of the soup toward a darker beef broth, which some will prefer.
- The beansBaked beans of the period were commonly molasses-and-salt-pork Boston beans, noticeably sweet. Canned baked beans today tend to be sweeter still, so taste before salting and consider plain cooked navy beans if you want the tomato forward.
- Rubbing throughA modern wide-holed colander will struggle with this. Use a fine sieve and the back of a ladle, or blitz with a stick blender and then sieve once to catch bean skins.
- The butter and flourA teaspoon of each, rubbed to a paste, is beurre mani— whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then bring back to a boil for a moment as directed so the flour loses its raw taste.
- YieldNo yield is stated. A pint and a half of reduced broth plus a cup each of tomato and beans, less what is lost in sieving, comes to roughly a quart, enough for four small bowls as a first course. Toast or fry the bread squares while the soup finishes so they are still crisp when the soup goes over them.