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Tomato Soup (Cook until tender strain)
Cook until tender, strain through sieve and add 4 T salt 10 T sugar 8 T butter 1 t pepper Mabel Andrews.
Stir as for gravy 6 T flour. Add so as to thicken slightly. Cook 15 minutes longer. Seal hot.
Mrs. Herman Brockman. 14 qts. ripe tomatoes 14 stalks celery 14 sprigs parsley 1 bay leaf 7 small onions 21 cloves 1 green pepper 1 red pepper
This is a bulk canning recipe — a tomato soup base put up by the gallon in late summer and sealed in jars for winter. The method it describes, open-kettle sealing, is no longer considered safe for a product of this composition, and the reasons are specific.
- Why it fails: low-acid vegetables in a sealed jarTomatoes alone sit near the pH line where Clostridium botulinum can grow; 14 stalks of celery, 7 onions and two peppers push the finished mixture well into low-acid territory. Nothing in the recipe acidifies it, and no pressure processing is specified, so the sealed jar becomes exactly the oxygen-free, low-acid environment the organism needs.
- Why it fails: "Seal hot"Open-kettle canning means ladling boiling food into jars and letting the cooling lid pull a vacuum. The seal may look perfect while the contents never reach a temperature that destroys botulinum spores, and boiling at 212F does not destroy them at all. Current practice requires a pressure canner for any low-acid product, at a measured pressure and time this recipe does not give.
- Why it fails: butter and flourEight tablespoons of butter and six of flour make the soup thick and fatty, which slows heat penetration into the centre of the jar and shields spores. Modern canning guidance excludes flour, fat and dairy from home-canned products for precisely this reason. If you want tomato soup put up for winter, follow a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service.
- Reading the textThe page appears to have been set out of order. The ingredient list reads as though it belongs at the top, the cooking and straining next, then seasoning, then the flour thickening. Two contributors' names sit in the middle of the instructions -- one of them, Mabel Andrews, dropped mid-sentence -- which happens in community cookbooks assembled from handwritten cards.
- UnitsT is a tablespoon and t a teaspoon. As written the batch runs to roughly 14 quarts of raw tomatoes before straining, which is a wash-boiler quantity rather than a saucepan one.
- "Stir as for gravy"The instruction leans on the reader's familiarity with thickening: keep stirring as the flour goes in, so it disperses rather than clots. It is one of the few technique notes the recipe gives, which suggests how much the compilers assumed of their readers.
Church and ladies' aid cookbooks were compiled by subscription in small Midwestern towns and sold to raise money for the congregation. In books of that kind, recipes came in on cards from named members, which is why so many pages carry two or three contributors and why the typesetting sometimes scrambles them. A soup base of this size belongs to the annual canning week: tomatoes came in all at once from the garden or from a neighbouring truck farm, and a household put up its whole winter's supply in a few hot days. Open-kettle sealing was standard household practice well into the twentieth century, and the safety limits of the method han plain fruit — were not widely understood until home-canning research and extension bulletins began circulating in the 1910s and after.