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Mock Bisque Soup
One quart of tomatoes cooked tender in one quart of water. Strain this and put the liquor back upon the stove; add one teaspoon of soda, a little butter, salt and pepper to taste, and, just before it is served, one quart of boiling milk. A little thickening and onion improves it for some tastes. - Mrs C. B. Stoddard.
A two-quart cream of tomato soup built on the old trick of neutralizing the tomato's acid with baking soda so the milk will not curdle. Everything hinges on the order and temperature of that final addition.
- The hinge: soda, then milk, then serveStir the soda into the hot tomato liquor away from the heat and let it foam out completely before the milk goes in. Combine the two hot liquids only at the moment of serving and do not let the finished soup boil, or it will separate however much soda you used.
- Go easier on the sodaA full teaspoon per quart of tomato is more than modern canned tomatoes need and leaves a flat, faintly soapy taste. Start with a scant quarter teaspoon, taste, and add more only if the milk shows any sign of breaking.
- "One quart of tomatoes"Most likely home-canned tomatoes, juice and all, though fresh in season would also have been measured this way. Use two 14-15 oz cans of whole or crushed tomatoes with their liquid, or about 2 lb of ripe fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped.
- StrainingThe original discards the pulp entirely, which gives a thin, clear-tasting soup. Pressing the solids through a sieve, or blending and then straining, keeps the body and colour and makes the "little thickening" unnecessary.
- Thickening, if you want itThe vague "little thickening" would mean a flour-and-butter roux or a flour-and-milk slurry. About 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, with the tomato whisked in, is a light proportion for this quantity of soup.
- The onionAdd half a small onion, sliced, to the tomatoes at the start of the cooking and strain it out with the pulp. Cooked in at the beginning it reads as savoury depth rather than raw onion.
- Times and yieldTwenty to twenty-five minutes at a simmer is enough to cook canned tomatoes tender; fresh may want thirty. Counting the quart of water and the quart of milk, the recipe makes closer to three quarts, serving eight or more as a first course.
"Mock" in a nineteenth-century American cookbook signals a cheap stand-in for something expensive, and here the target is a true bisque — a shellfish soup, thickened in the French manner and finished with cream. Tomato and milk cost a fraction of lobster or crab, and this version is credited to Mrs C. B. Stoddard. The saleratus-and-soda habit is the period fingerprint: home cooks had learned that acid curdles milk long before anyone explained why, and a spoonful of soda was the accepted remedy, used with what may seem a free hand today. Campbell's put canned condensed tomato soup on the market at the end of the 1890s.