Home › Soups › Clear Tomato Soup
Clear Tomato Soup
1 pint canned tomatoes, or sufficient fresh tomatoes to make 1 pint when stewed 1 cup water 1/2 onion, sliced A bit of bay leaf A few grains of summer savory A few grains of thyme 1 teaspoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt Cook all together twenty minutes. Rub through a fine colander. Reheat, adding water to make up for what has boiled away. Thicken with two tablespoons flour rubbed smooth with a little cold water. Add one tablespoon butter or salad oil.
A plain strained tomato soup from the era when canned tomatoes had just become a kitchen staple. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- "Clear" is relativeThis is clear only in the sense that it contains no milk, cream or stock meat — it is strained rather than consommé-like, and the flour at the end leaves it lightly bodied and opaque. Do not expect a transparent broth.
- QuantitiesA pint of canned tomatoes is 2 cups, close enough to one 15-oz can with its juice. For fresh, start with about 1 1/2 lb ripe tomatoes, stewed down until they measure a pint.
- "A few grains"For dried summer savory and thyme this means a pinch of each, roughly 1/8 teaspoon. "A bit of bay leaf" is half a small leaf; a whole one will dominate a soup this size.
- Fine colanderUse a fine-mesh sieve and press hard with the back of a ladle, or run the whole thing through a food mill on its finest plate. The point is to leave skins and seeds behind while pushing the pulp through — a blender alone will not remove them.
- The thickeningWhisk the 2 tablespoons flour with 3 to 4 tablespoons cold water until perfectly lump-free, add it to the simmering soup in a thin stream while stirring, then let it boil gently 2 to 3 minutes. Cut short, the flour tastes raw and pasty.
- Salt and sugarThe teaspoon of salt suits canned tomatoes packed without added salt, as much of the period's product was; a good deal of canned tomato today is already salted, so consider adding half and correcting at the end. The sugar offsets acidity rather than sweetening.
- Butter last, off the heatStir the tablespoon of butter in after the soup has stopped boiling so it emulsifies rather than separating into slicks. Oil works the same way; 'salad oil' at this date might mean olive oil or a refined seed oil such as cottonseed.
- YieldAbout 3 cups after the water is made up — two generous or four small servings as a first course.
Recipes like this one belong to the period when canned tomatoes were becoming something a cook could expect to find in the cupboard year-round. Canned is listed first here, though what that ordering signifies about relative reliability is inference rather than evidence. Bay, thyme and summer savory were all in use as dried herbs in American and English domestic cookery at this date, savory being particularly associated with New England kitchen gardens and much less used now than oregano or basil. Cookery writers distinguished "clear" soups — thin, strained, served at the start of a meal — from the richer cream and puree soups, though a tomato soup thickened with a spoonful of flour, as here, sits awkwardly across that line.