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Tomato Cream Soup
3/4 quart milk 1 1/2 tablespoons flour 3/4 to 1 teaspoon salt Tomato juice Heat milk in a double boiler. Thicken with the flour rubbed smooth with a little cold milk. Whip in sufficient hot tomato juice to give the soup a pretty pink color. Add salt, and serve at once.
A thin, pale cream soup of the kind served as a first course in early twentieth-century American households. The whole success of it rests on keeping the milk from curdling when the acid tomato goes in.
- The hinge: curdlingTomato acid clots hot milk on contact. The flour paste is the insurance — it coats the protein — but the tomato juice must be hot when it goes in, added gradually while whisking, and the soup served immediately rather than held on the heat.
- 3/4 quartThree cups of milk. With enough tomato juice to colour it, the finished soup comes to roughly a quart.
- Tomato juice, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity; the cook works to colour, as the instruction says. Figure about 1 cup for 3 cups of milk; much beyond that and the soup will be thinner and more prone to separating unless the flour is increased.
- Thickening1 1/2 tablespoons flour for 3 cups of milk is very light — this is a drinking-thin soup, not a chowder. Rub the flour smooth with 3 to 4 tablespoons of cold milk before adding, or it will lump.
- Double boilerUsed here because scalded milk sticks and scorches over direct heat. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works if you stir, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving with a flour-thickened milk base.
- Tomato juice todayCommercial tomato juice is usually already salted; taste before adding the full teaspoon. Canned crushed tomatoes strained and heated, or the juice from a can of whole tomatoes, give more flavour than bottled juice.
- YieldFour small first-course servings, or two as a light lunch dish.
Cream of tomato belongs to the great age of the double boiler, when milk-based soups were held up as nourishing, digestible food suitable for children and invalids as well as for the opening course of a dinner. Cookbooks of this period return again and again to the problem this recipe quietly solves: acid and milk do not sit together, and period manuals variously advise adding a little soda to the tomato, thickening the milk first, or combining the two only at the last possible moment. The instruction to whip in "sufficient hot tomato juice to give the soup a pretty pink color" is characteristic of household manuals aimed at cooks who were expected to judge by eye rather than measure. Canned tomato products became widely available in American kitchens through the later nineteenth century, which is what makes a tomato soup like this practical year-round.