Simple, Clear Tomato Soup
Boil your tomatoes with onion and butter thoroughly. Add to clear stock, or broth, half of white of egg to clear. Let it stand, then pass through cheesecloth that has been washed.
A tiny recipe with a professional technique hidden in it: clarifying a soup to crystal clarity with egg white.
- The egg-white “raft”Beaten egg white (with a little of its shell, classically) is stirred into the warm stock; as it cooks it coagulates and traps the cloudy particles, which you then strain away. This is how consommé is made clear.
- Strain through damp cheeseclothLine a sieve with rinsed cheesecloth and ladle gently — don’t stir the raft — for a sparkling, clear tomato broth.
- Start with good stockSince there’s nowhere to hide, use a flavorful clear stock and ripe tomatoes; season well after clarifying.
Clear soups were a mark of refinement at the turn-of-the-century table — a perfectly limpid consommé announced a skilled kitchen. The egg-white clarification described here in miniature is the same method French chefs used for their grand consommés, a bit of practical food science (proteins coagulating and gathering impurities) dressed up as a dinner-party flourish.
From page 7 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
