Tomato Bisque
Blend two tablespoons of butter melted with the same quantity of flour. Thin this with a pint of hot milk or cream. Add a pint of hot strained tomato.
Three sentences with no seasoning, no yield and no warning about the one thing that goes wrong. Here is what the terseness leaves out.
- The hinge: curdlingAcid tomato meets hot milk and the milk proteins clump. Keep both hot but below a boil, pour the tomato into the milk sauce in a thin stream while whisking, and serve at once rather than holding it over heat. A pinch of baking soda stirred into the tomato before combining will neutralize some of the acid and makes curdling much less likely, at the cost of a little brightness.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. The finished soup is roughly a quart, which serves four as a first course.
- Strained tomatoIn 1911 this meant fresh or canned tomatoes stewed down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Passata or a smooth canned tomato purée is the direct equivalent; do not use tomato paste, which is far more concentrated, or a jarred pasta sauce.
- Cook the rouxEstes says only to blend butter and flour. Let the paste bubble a minute or two over low heat before the milk goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour.
- Milk or creamWhole milk gives a thin, clean bisque; half-and-half or light cream gives the body most readers expect from the word. Heavy cream is less prone to breaking than milk, another argument for it here.
- SeasoningNone is specified, and the soup needs it: salt, white pepper, and a small amount of sugar if the tomatoes are sharp. A bay leaf or a slice of onion steeped in the hot milk and then removed is period-appropriate and worth the trouble.
"Bisque" is often said to have described a rich shellfish soup thickened with pounded shells or rice, though the early French usage covered poultry and game as well and the word's history is contested; by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had stretched it to cover any smooth cream soup, tomato most of all. This version comes from Rufus Estes' Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author; Estes was born into slavery in Tennessee and spent most of his career cooking in Pullman private railroad cars before moving to the commissary of a Chicago steel company. The extreme brevity here is characteristic of the book and of professional writing generally: a cook who made cream soups daily needed the proportions, not the procedure. Tomato bisque became a fixture of hotel, dining-car and later canned-soup menus, and it is tempting to credit its reliance on two shelf-stable staples, flour and put-up tomato, rather than on anything seasonal.