Tomato Soup
1 quart tomatoes, raw or canned 2 teaspoons sugar 1 pint water 1 teaspoon salt 12 peppercorns 1/8 teaspoon soda Bit of bay leaf 2 tablespoons butter 4 cloves 3 tablespoons flour 1 slice onion Cook tomatoes, water, seasonings, and sugar twenty minutes; strain, and add salt and soda. Brown butter and flour cooked together; bind, and strain into tureen.
A brown-roux tomato soup of the sort that stood at the head of every American soup chapter around 1900. The whole spices are cooked in and strained out, so nothing needs grinding.
- QuantitiesA quart of tomatoes is about 32 oz — one large 28 oz can with its juice is close enough, or roughly 2 lb of ripe fresh tomatoes, cored and roughly cut. A pint of water is 2 cups.
- The sodaThe 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda is there to blunt the acidity of the tomatoes, a habit associated with soups that were finished with milk. The recipe adds it after straining; it will foam briefly. Leave it out entirely if you prefer a brighter, sharper soup, and taste before adding more — too much gives a flat, soapy note.
- "Brown butter and flour cooked together"This is a brown roux: melt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 3 tablespoons flour, and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell, 4 to 6 minutes. The browning is the point of the recipe's flavour, but flour loses thickening power as it darkens, so expect a soup the consistency of thin cream rather than a heavy purée.
- "Bind"Whisk the hot strained tomato liquid into the roux a ladleful at a time, then bring to a simmer for 2 to 3 minutes to cook out the raw flour taste. Adding it all at once is what produces lumps.
- Strain twiceThe first straining, after the twenty-minute simmer, removes the peppercorns, cloves, bay and onion along with the seeds and skins — press the pulp firmly through a sieve rather than discarding it. The second straining, into the tureen, catches any roux lumps.
- SaltSalt appears in the list once and again in the method; treat the teaspoon as the total and add it at the end, after straining, when you can taste the finished soup. Canned tomatoes are often salted already.
- YieldA little under 1 1/2 quarts after cooking and straining, or four first-course servings. Serve straight from the tureen; croutons fried in butter were a common accompaniment to soups of this kind.
Tomato soup thickened with browned butter and flour rather than cream belongs to the era just before condensed soup made the pink-and-white version universal — Campbell's canned condensed tomato soup went on sale in the late 1890s, and household manuals of the following decades were still teaching cooks to build the same flavour from scratch. The pinch of soda is characteristic of the period: cookbooks of the day often warned that tomato acid would curdle milk, and a little alkali was a common precaution, sometimes called for whether or not milk appeared in the pot. The whole cloves, peppercorns and bay steeped and then strained out follow an older practice of flavouring by infusion.