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Mock Bisque Soup
A large tablespoonful of butter, I bay-leaf, A blade of mace, ¼ teaspoonful of baking soda, 1 pint of canned tomatoes or one pint of stewed tomatoes, A sprig of parsley, 1 teaspoonful of sugar, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour.
Put the tomatoes in a saucepan with the bay-leaf, parsley and mace. Cover and stand on the back part of the stove fifteen minutes. Put the milk in a double boiler; rub the butter and flour together, add to the milk and stir until it thickens. Press the tomatoes through a sieve sufficiently fine to remove the seeds. Then put them into the soup tureen. Add the sugar and soda and then pour in quickly the boiling milk. Stir and serve immediately. This mock bisque soup must not go over the fire after the milk and tomatoes are mixed or they will separate. If not ready to serve, keep the tomatoes hot and the milk hot, but separately. Then mix and add the soda and sugar just the moment of serving time.
I onion, 2 potatoes,
A cream-of-tomato soup built on the trick of keeping the two halves apart until the tureen. The ingredient list as printed is defective — the milk is called for in the method but never quantified, and the onion and potatoes at the end belong to the next recipe — so read the instructions rather than the list.
- The hinge: never reheatOnce the acid tomato purée meets the thickened milk, the soup cannot go back on the heat without curdling. Have both components hot, combine in the warmed tureen, and serve at once.</p>
- Missing milk quantityThe original omits it. A pint of tomatoes against a pint of milk gives the balance the method implies, and three tablespoons of flour will thicken a pint of milk to a light cream.
- The onion and potatoesThese two lines appear to be stray type from an adjacent recipe and have no role in the method as written. Ignore them.
- Baking sodaA scant quarter teaspoon neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk from breaking. More than that gives a soapy, flat taste and a brownish colour, so measure it rather than shaking it in.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a shard of the lacy covering of a nutmeg, roughly an inch long. About an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace is the nearest substitute, but it will cloud the soup slightly and cannot be fished out.
- "Back part of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cooler zone. Use the lowest burner setting or a heat diffuser — the tomatoes should barely steam for fifteen minutes to draw out the herbs, not reduce.
- Double boilerStill worth using for the milk, since a flour-thickened milk scorches readily. If you use a heavy saucepan directly, stir constantly and keep the heat moderate.
- Seasoning and yieldNo salt or pepper is specified; season the milk before combining. Serves four as a first course.
The name records a piece of Victorian and Edwardian menu diplomacy: a true bisque was a shellfish soup, thickened with pounded lobster or crayfish, and calling a tomato-and-milk soup "mock bisque" told diners to expect its colour and its smooth, creamy body at a fraction of the cost. The same impulse produced mock turtle, mock duck and mock oyster in the cookbooks of the era. What makes the dish possible at all is canned tomatoes, cheap and reliable by the 1890s, and the recipe belongs to a period when cooks were learning why milk curdles in acid -- hence the pinch of soda, a fix that appears again and again in tomato soup recipes of the time. The instruction to keep the two pans hot separately until the moment of serving is the older, surer answer to the same problem.