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Hasty Tomato Soup
Boil one quart of milk, and add one cup of canned or cooked tomatoes, also cracker or bread crumbs to thicken sufficiently. Season with butter, pepper and salt, bring to a boil and serve. Sarah M. Siewer, MD.
Four ingredients and no timings, which puts all the weight on one step: getting acidic tomato into hot milk without splitting it. Everything else here is adjustment.
- The hinge: curdlingBoiling milk and then adding tomato is the reliable way to make it break into curds and whey. Warm the milk to a bare steam rather than a rolling boil, and stir the hot milk gradually into the tomato rather than the other way round; the final "bring to a boil" is best read as bring back to serving heat.
- A pinch of sodaSome period recipes call for a small pinch of baking soda stirred into the tomato to neutralise its acid before combining. It works, though it foams alarmingly and dulls the tomato flavour slightly. A little flour-and-butter roux in the milk is the modern alternative and holds the emulsion better.
- Canned or cooked tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period were generally packed whole in their own juice, and tend to be more acidic and less sweet than many sold today. A cup of canned tomatoes with their liquid, roughly chopped, is the intended thing; passata or crushed tomatoes work and give a smoother result.
- Crumbs as thickenerCracker crumbs in this period usually meant a plain soda or common cracker, close to unsalted saltines. Start with a quarter cup for the quart of milk and add more only after a few minutes, since crumbs keep swelling. Stale bread crumbs give a coarser body; blending at the end smooths it out.
- Seasoning"Season with butter" means a tablespoon or two stirred in at the end for richness, not for frying. Salt generously, since milk and crackers both mute it.
- YieldA quart of milk plus tomato serves four as a first course, three as a light supper.
Tomato soup thickened with milk was a popular American convenience dish of the late nineteenth century, helped along by cheap canned tomatoes, which became a widely available year-round staple in the decades after the Civil War. "Hasty" here is a genuine claim: no stock, no straining, no roux, nothing that cannot be done in the time it takes milk to heat. Cracker crumbs as a thickener belong to the same tradition as oyster stew and milk toast, where a box of soda crackers stood in for flour or bread. The attribution to a named contributor with an MD after it is typical of community and reader-contributed collections of the period.