Tomato Soup
Into a skillet put two tablespoons of butter and melt. Add to this an onion sliced, and fry until the onion is cooked. Remove the onion and into this fat blend two tablespoons of flour. Add the strained juice of one-quart can of tomatoes, which has been heated. Season with salt and pepper. Add one pint boiling water.
A plain flour-thickened tomato broth of the sort that opened a great many meals a century ago. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and most of the decisions the original leaves unmade are ones a competent cook can settle at the stove.
- The hinge: cook the roux, then add hot liquidLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two before any tomato goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour. The recipe specifies heated tomato juice and boiling water for a reason — cold liquid into hot roux gives lumps.
- A quart can of tomatoesThen and now that is roughly 28 to 32 oz. Strained, it yields about 2 cups of juice and pulp; press the solids firmly through a sieve rather than discarding them, since that is where the body is.
- Two tablespoons of flour to three cups of liquidTwo tablespoons of flour to four cups of liquid -- That is a light thickening — the result is a brothy soup, not a velouté. If you want it heavier, go to three tablespoons of flour and keep the butter at two.
- The onionEstes fries it only to flavour the fat, then lifts it out. Slice it thin so it gives up flavour quickly, and take it out before it colours past golden; a scorched onion will carry through the whole pot.
- Acidity and curdlingThere is no milk here, so the tomato acid poses no problem. If you are tempted to finish it with cream, temper the cream with hot soup off the heat rather than pouring cold cream into the pan.
- SeasoningCanned tomatoes vary enormously in salt and sweetness. Taste at the end; a pinch of sugar rescues a harsh can, and the pepper is better freshly ground than the pre-ground pepper of 1911.
- YieldAbout 4 cups, or four first-course servings. Doubling is straightforward.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. Estes was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, worked his way through Chicago kitchens and the Pullman private-car service, and was cooking for the executives of the U.S. Steel subsidiary in Chicago when he compiled the book. The recipe shows how thoroughly canned tomatoes had entered ordinary American cooking by then: commercial canning expanded rapidly after the Civil War, and by the 1900s a quart can of tomatoes was a pantry staple that let a cook make soup in any season. The method itself — butter-and-flour roux, an onion fried and removed, hot liquid whisked in — is straight out of the professional French repertoire Estes worked within, applied here to the plainest possible ingredient list.