Creole Soup
1 quart Brown Soup Stock 1 pint tomatoes 3 tablespoons chopped green peppers 2 tablespoons chopped onion 1/4 cup butter 1/3 cup flour Salt Pepper Cayenne 2 tablespoons grated horseradish 1 teaspoon vinegar 1/4 cup macaroni rings Cook pepper and onion in butter five minutes. Add flour, stock, and tomatoes, and simmer fifteen minutes. Strain, rub through sieve, and season highly with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Just before serving add horseradish, vinegar, and macaroni previously cooked and cut in rings.
A thickened tomato soup on a brown stock base, finished with raw horseradish and vinegar. The seasonings at the end are the point of the dish and should not go in early.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart is 4 cups of stock, a pint is 2 cups of tomatoes. Canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice work; the mixture is sieved anyway.
- Brown soup stockIn this period that means a beef stock in which some of the meat and bone has been browned before simmering, giving a darker colour and fuller body. A good unsalted beef stock is the nearest substitute; season only at the end, since the recipe calls for high seasoning.
- The rouxA quarter cup butter to a third cup flour, a fairly loose roux by weight. The recipe simply says to add flour, then stock and tomatoes; adding the liquid gradually helps avoid lumps.
- Strain, then sieveThe instruction is two steps: pour off through a strainer, then press the solids through so the pulp thickens the soup. A food mill does this well; a blender changes the texture but is quicker.
- Horseradish and vinegar go in off the heatThe recipe adds them just before serving. Heat drives off horseradish's pungency quickly, and boiling blunts the vinegar's aroma. Grated fresh horseradish is what is meant; prepared horseradish already contains vinegar, so cut the added vinegar if you use it.
- Macaroni ringsShort tubular macaroni, cooked first and then cut crosswise into rings, as the recipe directs, and added at the last moment. Any small pasta of similar size serves; a quarter cup dry is a modest garnish, not a body.
- YieldFive to six cups after simmering and sieving, serving four to six as a first course.
"Creole" in American cookbooks of this period was often used as shorthand for tomatoes, sweet peppers and onion, a trio associated loosely with Louisiana cooking and applied to soups, sauces and egg dishes far from New Orleans. This soup suggests how far the label had drifted from its origin: the horseradish, vinegar and macaroni rings owe little to Creole practice, and the brown stock and butter roux belong to the cooking-school manner of the day.