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Foundation for Cream Soups
1 qt. milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon white pepper 1 speck of cayenne Scald milk with the onion. Melt butter, add Gold Medal flour and cook until frothy, but be careful not to let the butter brown; add 1 cup of the hot milk slowly and cook together until thickened. Return to the double boiler. Add seasonings. It is now ready to finish in any way.
Cream of Tomato Soup (Mock Bisque) 1/2 can tomatoes 1 qt. milk 1/8 teaspoon soda 1 slice onion 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1/8 teaspoon white pepper Few grains cayenne Scald milk with onion, remove onion and thicken milk with Gold Medal flour cooked in melted butter. Cook tomatoes with sugar fifteen minutes, add soda. Rub through puree strainer, add seasonings. Combine mixtures immediately before serving.
A basic milk-and-roux base, plus a tomato variation, from an era when cream soups were built at home rather than opened. Two details carry the whole thing: the roux must not brown, and the tomato and milk must not sit together.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon was generally reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, which makes half a saltspoon about an eighth of a teaspoon. In the tomato version the amounts are already given in teaspoons.
- The roux is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a quart of milk gives a barely bound soup, the consistency of thin cream. That is intentional in a foundation meant to be finished with pureed vegetables, which add their own body. If you are serving it plain, increase the butter and flour; the tomato version uses three tablespoons of each to the same quart of milk.
- Do not let the butter brownThe recipe stops to say so explicitly. A blond roux keeps the base white and neutral so it can take on the flavour of whatever vegetable is added; even a light nut colour will show in a pale soup and dull the finished flavour.
- Scalding the milk with onionScald means heating to just below a boil, until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge, around 180F. The onion is an infusion, not an ingredient, and the second recipe tells you to fish it out. Do the same with the foundation unless you want onion pieces in the strained soup.
- The double boilerOnce thickened, the base goes back over water so it can hold without scorching or forming a skin. A heavy saucepan over low heat with occasional stirring does the same job if you are serving within a few minutes.
- The soda, and why the soup curdlesTomato acid clots milk protein. The eighth teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough of that acid to make the join possible, but it is not insurance: more than that gives a soapy, flat taste and a dulled tomato colour. The real protection is the last line, combine immediately before serving, and pour the hot tomato into the hot milk rather than the reverse.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod cans varied, commonly from about 20 oz up to nearer a quart, so half a can is somewhere between a cup and a quarter and two cups of tomatoes with their juice. A 14.5 oz can of whole or diced tomatoes, used whole, sits within that range.
- Mock bisqueThe "mock" appears to acknowledge that this is a bisque in name only: no shellfish and no cream, only milk. If you want it richer, replace a cup of the milk with light cream in the foundation rather than adding cream at the end.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the tomato makes about five cups, enough for four as a first course.
Gold Medal Flour's cookbooks were built around recipes that used flour in places a modern cook might not think to look for it, and a thickened milk base for soup was one way flour found its way into a first course. The technique itself is straight out of the American cooking-school tradition that Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School had made standard by the turn of the century: teach one foundation, then list the variations that hang off it. Cream of tomato had a particular household appeal because canned tomatoes were cheap and available year-round, and the "mock bisque" label acknowledged openly that a true bisque meant shellfish and cream. The pinch of soda is the period's standard answer to the curdling problem, and it appears in other contemporary cookbooks; modern practice leans more on tempering and last-minute combining, which this recipe also, sensibly, insists on.