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Cream of Tomato Soup
2 t butter 1 t flour ⅓ t soda 1 pt. hot milk Gyda Finstad.
Wash and soak rice one hour. Put tomatoes in a kettle with a pint of cold water and let gradually come to a boil; then add another pint of cold water and when it comes to a boil, add the rice, salt and pepper. Boil until rice is tender or about 45 minutes. Stir in paste made by rubbing together the butter, flour, soda and hot milk. (Add enough milk to make soup about the thickness of heavy cream.) Cook a few minutes and serve hot.
Mrs. H. W. Smith. 14 qts. tomatoes 14 stalks celery 14 bay leaves 2 lb. onions
This page has come through transcription badly: two recipes have collided and several fractions have lost their numerators. The method is intact and workable, but the quantities need judgement.
- The trailing listThe soda now reads a third of a teaspoon, matching the printed page. The list that follows the method — 14 quarts tomatoes, 14 stalks celery, 14 bay leaves, 2 pounds onions — belongs to a separate large-batch recipe with its own quantities, not to this one. Go by the method here, which names two pints of cold water added in stages, rice, salt and pepper, and milk added until the soup is about the thickness of heavy cream.
- t means teaspoont here is presumably teaspoon and T tablespoon, the usual convention in books of this kind. Two teaspoons of butter to one of flour is a thin binder, not a true roux; the rice is doing most of the thickening.
- Where the recipe endsThe trailing list (tomatoes, celery, bay leaves, onions) appears to belong to another recipe on the original page. Ignore it here.
- The soda is the hingeBaking soda neutralises enough of the tomato acid to keep the milk from curdling when the two meet. Add the milk paste off a hard boil, stirring it in, and keep the pot below a simmer afterward; the soup will still break if it boils hard with dairy in it.
- Soaking the riceAn hour's soak suited the coarser, dustier rice of the period. Modern packaged long-grain rice needs only a rinse and will be tender well before 45 minutes — check at 20 and cook on if it is still chalky.
- Amount of riceNone is given. A quarter cup of raw rice to two quarts of liquid gives a soup; a half cup gives something considerably thicker.
- TomatoesPut-up tomatoes are the likely intent, skins and all, though fresh would serve in season. A 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, crushed, stands in roughly for a quart. If you want it smooth, sieve or blend before adding the milk.
- YieldNot recoverable, since no tomato quantity survives; the two pints of water and pint of milk alone come to about a quart and a half.
Church and parish cookbooks like this one were compiled by contribution: each contributor sent in one or two dishes over her own name, which is why a single page can carry Gyda Finstad's name, Mrs. H. W. Smith's, and the beginning of a third recipe, with no editor to reconcile the measurements. Cream of tomato soup was fashionable around the turn of the century — canned tomatoes had become cheap and reliable by the 1890s, and commercial condensed tomato soup arrived at the end of that decade, spreading the flavour combination well beyond the households that first made it. The dash of soda is the period's standard answer to the old problem of acid curdling milk, and it appears in tomato soup recipes in American cookbooks of the period; adding rice as a thickener instead of a flour-heavy white sauce is the thriftier, older habit underneath the newer dish. Finstad is a Norwegian name, and Scandinavian immigrant congregations produced a great many of these fundraising volumes.