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Tomato Soup with Peppers & Onions
6 green peppers 16 T sugar 6 T salt Boil all ingredients except sugar and salt, and strain. Then season with sugar and salt. Boil and can while hot. 1/2 bu. tomatoes 8 onions, med. size 12 stalks celery 3 bay leaves 25 whole cloves
This is a bulk tomato soup base meant to be put up in jars for the winter, and the canning method it describes is the reason it cannot be followed today. The notes below explain the quantities and then the specific hazard.
- The ingredient list runs backwardsAs printed, the peppers, sugar and salt come first and the bulk of the recipe trails after the instructions. Read it as half a bushel of tomatoes, 8 medium onions, 12 stalks of celery, 3 bay leaves, 25 whole cloves and 6 green peppers, boiled and strained, then seasoned with 16 tablespoons sugar and 6 tablespoons salt.
- T means tablespoonIn a book of this vintage a capital T is a tablespoon and a lowercase t a teaspoon. Sixteen tablespoons is a cup of sugar; six tablespoons is a bit over a third of a cup of salt. Both are plausible for the volume involved.
- Half a bushel of tomatoesA bushel of tomatoes runs 50 to 53 lb, so half a bushel is roughly 25 to 27 lb — about a canner-load's worth. The recipe is scaled for a family putting up a season's supply at once, not for a single dinner.
- Open-kettle canning is the fatal flaw"Boil and can while hot" means pouring hot soup into jars and sealing, with no processing in a canner afterwards. The seal that forms as the jar cools is not evidence of sterility, and this method has been off every current canning guideline for decades.
- The onions, celery and peppers push it out of rangeTomatoes alone sit near the acidity borderline; adding onions, celery and peppers raises the pH of the finished soup into low-acid territory. Clostridium botulinum spores survive boiling at 212F and germinate in the anaerobic, low-acid interior of a sealed jar. Boiling-water processing will not reach them either — low-acid vegetable soups require pressure processing at measured times and pressures the recipe does not supply.
- Straining does not helpRemoving the solids removes texture, not spores or pH. A strained purée of tomato, onion and celery is exactly the kind of dense, low-acid liquid in which botulinum toxin develops without any smell, gas or off appearance to warn you.
- Salt and sugar are not preservatives hereA third of a cup of salt across 25 lb of vegetables is seasoning, not a cure. Neither the salt nor the sugar is anywhere near the concentration that would inhibit bacterial growth.
- If you want tomato soup base for the pantryUse a current tested recipe from a modern preserving authority, with its stated processing method. As a fresh soup eaten within a few days and kept refrigerated, the flavour combination here — tomato, onion, celery, bay, clove — is perfectly sound; it is the jar that is the problem.
Church and charity cookbooks of the early twentieth century were one of the channels by which home canning instructions travelled, alongside jar-makers' booklets and government and extension bulletins, and they carried the practices of their contributors' kitchens rather than any tested standard. Open-kettle canning of this sort was ordinary household procedure well into the 1920s, and only steadily gave way as agricultural extension services and the USDA pushed pressure canning for low-acid foods; the pressure canner itself was a commercial technology adapted for home use over the same period. The clove-and-bay seasoning marks this as a soup in the older American style, closer to a spiced tomato stock than to the condensed tomato soup Campbell's had been selling in cans since 1897 — a reminder that a great deal of what a family ate in February had been boiled and jarred the previous August.