Tomato Soup
Take one quart ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped up, or a three-pound can of same, put in an earthenware baking dish with 1 pint grated corn (or, if in winter, dried corn prepared as it for the table), and add-- 1 teacup sugar. 1 teacup grated cracker. 1 teacup butter. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. 2 teaspoonfuls salt.
Set this in a hot oven with a tin plate over it to prevent browning. Have ready, in a porcelain kettle or pan, two quarts new milk boiling hot. When the tomatoes and corn are thoroughly done, stir in one large Irish potato mashed smooth, a little minced onion and parsley, and pour into boiling milk and serve.--Mrs. S.T.
Tomato Soup.
A shin of beef, season to your taste with all kinds of vegetables: Tomatoes, turnips, carrots, potatoes, cabbage cut fine, corn, butter beans and celery. When nearly done, take vegetables out and mash them well, and also cut the beef up fine. It is best to season with salt and pepper when you first put it on. The beef should be put on very early.--Mrs. J. L. Clear Tomato Soup. 1 large can tomatoes. 1 beef shin. 1 bunch soup herbs. 1 gallon water.
Boil eight hours, stir and skim several times. Strain through wire sieve, add one tablespoonful Worcester sauce and same of brown sugar. Serve with dice of toasted bread; pepper and salt to taste--Mrs. R.R.
Three tomato soups from three contributors: a baked corn-and-tomato purée finished in milk, a long-simmered beef-and-vegetable pot, and a clear beef-tomato broth. The measures are of their period and the first one in particular needs interpretation before you start.
- The teacup problemA teacup is conventionally reckoned at about 3/4 cup (6 fl oz), though the book does not define it and usage varied by household. On that reading Mrs. S.T.'s soup takes roughly 6 fl oz each of sugar and butter to a quart of tomatoes, which is a great deal of both; you may prefer to start with a fraction of the sugar and taste.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. The tin plate laid over the dish is there to stop the surface browning; foil does the same job.
- Grated crackerPlain unsalted soda or water crackers crushed to crumbs, used as a thickener. About 3/4 cup of crumbs. Panko is too coarse and will not dissolve into the purée.
- New milk and curdlingNew milk is fresh, unskimmed whole milk. Acidic tomato poured into boiling milk curdles readily; hold the milk just below a simmer and pour the tomato mixture into it slowly, stirring, rather than the reverse.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamelled or enamel-lined pan, specified because bare iron, copper and tin react with tomato acid. Any nonreactive pot, including stainless steel, serves.
- Irish potatoAn ordinary white potato, distinguished in Southern books of the period from the sweet potato. One large boiled and mashed smooth thickens and binds the soup.
- Shin of beefThe lower foreleg, sold as beef shank or shin, usually cross-cut with the marrow bone in. It is the collagen in it that gives both beef soups their body. Ask a butcher; supermarkets often shelve it as soup bones.
- The eight-hour boilMrs. R.R.'s clear soup wants long, slow extraction, not a rolling boil, which clouds the stock and emulsifies fat into it. Keep it at a bare tremble, skim as directed, and strain through a sieve lined with damp cloth if you want it genuinely clear.
- YieldThe first soup makes about three quarts and serves eight to ten. The gallon of water in the third reduces considerably over eight hours; expect two to three quarts of finished broth.
Tomato soup in a Virginia collection of the 1870s sits at the point where the tomato had, by tradition at least, finished its long move from suspect ornamental to kitchen staple in the American South. All three versions here come from named contributors, which is how Housekeeping in Old Virginia was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered receipts from some two hundred and fifty women, printing them with their initials rather than harmonising them into one house style, so the reader gets three different answers to the same question. Mrs. S.T.'s baked tomato and corn finished with hot milk is closer to a corn chowder than to anything sold as tomato soup today, and reflects a late-summer kitchen using both crops at their peak, with the note about dried corn showing how the same dish carried into winter. The other two are stock soups built on a shin of beef, a cheap collagen-rich cut commonly used in nineteenth-century household soup-making, with the tomato present as much for acidity and colour as for flavour. The last adds Worcester sauce and brown sugar.