Tomato Soup
Into four cups of brown stock put three cups of cold stewed tomato, one stalk of celery, one carrot and one onion chopped, four cloves, four peppercorns and one teaspoon of salt. Allow it to simmer slowly till the tomato is reduced to a pulp. It will take about one hour to cook. Put it in a puree sieve and press all the pulp possible through it. Melt one tablespoon of butter with two tablespoons of flour, add it to the puree and stir, cooking it till smooth. If you dislike the bitter flavor of the tomatoes add half a teaspoon of soda and two teaspoons of sugar before pouring the soup in the tureen. Serve with croutons.
A straightforward brown-stock tomato soup, thickened at the end rather than started from a roux. Two details are worth attention: the soda, and the order in which the thickening goes in.
- The soda is optional and easy to overdoHalf a teaspoon of baking soda in seven cups of soup neutralizes acidity and can flatten the tomato flavor into something soapy. Add a pinch at a time, off the heat, and taste; the sugar alone usually does the job. Expect vigorous foaming when it goes in.
- Brown stockThis means beef or veal bones roasted before simmering. A good low-sodium beef stock is the nearest substitute; the salt in the recipe assumes an unsalted homemade stock, so hold back and season at the end.
- Stewed tomatoMost likely fresh tomatoes stewed down, or leftovers of same; three cups of canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice is the practical substitute. Canned tomatoes are already cooked, so the hour of simmering is about melding and reducing rather than breaking them up.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxA roux made separately, not started at the beginning -- the butter and flour are melted together and then stirred into the hot puree, which the recipe says to cook 'till smooth.' Keep stirring at a simmer after it goes in so the flour cooks out and the soup does not taste pasty.
- Puree sieveA conical chinois or a food mill with a fine plate. A blender followed by a strainer works, though blending incorporates air and lightens the color; the mill gives the denser texture the original expects.
- Aromatics come outAromatics -- the cloves and peppercorns are flavoring only and are caught by the sieve along with the tomato skins and seeds; the celery, carrot and onion will partly press through as pulp. A rough chop is all that is needed.
- YieldAbout six cups after reduction and straining, or four to six servings as a first course. Croutons are best cut from stale bread and fried in butter rather than baked.
Tomato soup thickened with browned meat stock rather than cream or milk was one common form in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, when canned tomatoes had become cheap and reliable enough to be a pantry staple year-round. The instruction about the "bitter flavor of the tomatoes" points to a real problem of the era: early canned tomatoes were often acidic and sharp, and soda-and-sugar correction appears again and again in period recipes, particularly in cream of tomato, where acid curdles the milk. The technique is also a fossil of nineteenth-century chemistry enthusiasm in the kitchen, when saleratus and soda were treated as general-purpose correctives.