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Salt, Pepper, and Nutmeg (Put all these ingredients)
Put all these ingredients, except the tomatoes and the stock, into a sauté-pan and sauté them for five minutes, then add the tomatoes sliced; let them simmer, and when cooked pass through a fine sieve; add the cornflour to the stock, and let it boil about five minutes. Then stir it to the tomatoes, give it a boil up, and add the cream.
This soup can be made of tinned tomatoes.
This is the method half of a cream of tomato soup; the ingredient list belongs to the preceding page, so quantities have to be inferred. The proportions below are the standard ones for a soup of this type in period cookery.
- The missing ingredient listOnly the seasoning named in the title (salt, pepper, nutmeg) is attested here; the sautéed base was probably butter with onion and carrot, possibly a little bacon or ham, but the page gives no way of knowing. Any quantities are a modern reconstruction rather than the book's: for about 1.5 litres of soup one might reckon on 900 g tomatoes, 1 litre stock, 25 g butter, one small onion, one small carrot, 25 g cornflour and 150 ml cream.
- Sauté, not brownFive minutes in butter is meant to soften the aromatics and draw out their sweetness rather than to colour them; colour on the onion will darken the finished soup.
- Cornflour, not flourCornflour here is cornstarch. Slake it in a little cold stock before adding, or it will lump; the five-minute boil is there to cook out the raw starch taste, and it is not optional.
- Passing through a sieve'A fine sieve' would in this period likely have meant a tammy or fine hair sieve, worked with a wooden spoon or mushroom. A blender followed by a fine mesh sieve gives the same result faster; skipping the sieve leaves skin and seed fragments in the soup.
- The cream goes in last, off the heatThe cream goes in last -- The recipe adds it after the final boil up; do not let it return to a rolling boil, as tomato acid and hard boiling will cause the cream to separate.
- Tinned tomatoesThe closing line is genuine period advice and still holds. Whole peeled tinned tomatoes give a better soup out of season than pale fresh ones; use the juice and reduce the stock slightly to compensate.
- SeasoningNutmeg with tomato reads oddly now, but the title of the page confirms it belongs here, and it turns up in other savoury dishes of the period. Grate it fresh and use very little -- a couple of scrapes for the whole pot. A pinch of sugar balances the acidity if the tomatoes are sharp.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above, enough for about six as a first course; the original gives no yield.
Cream of tomato belongs to the wave of tomato cookery that reached British kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, once the fruit had shed its long reputation as suspect and tinned supplies from America and Italy made it a year-round ingredient. The construction here is thoroughly classical: tomatoes stewed down, the whole passed through a sieve and bound not with a roux but with cornflour. The instruction that it "can be made of tinned tomatoes" is worth noticing, a sign of how quickly canned goods had become respectable in professional kitchens.