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Cream of Tomato Soup
Cook together 1/2 of a can of tomatoes, 1 clove, 1 slice of onion, ½ of a teaspoonful of salt, ½ teaspoonful of peppercorns and 1 sprig of parsley for twenty minutes, then rub through a sieve and return to the fire. Taste to see that it is highly seasoned. Make 1 pint of white sauce and season with salt and pepper. Take both saucepans from the fire, add to the tomatoes I salt-spoonful of baking-soda and stir until it effervesces. After two minutes add the tomato to the sauce and serve immediately.
A great variety of cream vegetable soups may be made by following the above rules and substituting some other vegetable which has been cooked tender and reduced to a thin pulp.
Celery, salsify, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, canned peas, etc., all make most satisfactory cream soups.
A standard Boston-school cream soup, built on two pans that meet at the last moment. The soda step is the whole point of the method and is where most cooks go wrong.
- The hinge: pour tomato into sauce, off the heatAcid plus hot milk equals curds. Both pans must be off the fire, the soda goes into the tomato only, and the tomato is added to the white sauce -- never the reverse -- then served at once. Reheating or holding the finished soup will make it separate.
- Half a can of tomatoesCan sizes varied in this period, so the quantity is only approximate; roughly a cup of canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice, i.e. half a 14.5 oz can, is a reasonable reading.
- A salt-spoonfulAbout 1/4 teaspoon. That is the correct order of magnitude for the soda; more will taste soapy and flatten the tomato entirely.
- The peppercorns look wrongThe peppercorns look high -- 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls of whole peppercorns in about a cup of tomato is aggressive even for a soup meant to be highly seasoned, and the recipe as printed sets the numeral 1 as 'I' more than once, so the figure may be garbled. Six to eight peppercorns give the intended perfume; they are strained out anyway.
- White sauce, 1 pintThe recipe gives no proportions; two cups milk thickened with 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, cooked a few minutes so the flour loses its raw taste, suits a cream soup. At a tablespoon each per cup of milk that is a thin sauce; the soup should coat a spoon lightly, not stand up.
- Rubbing through a sieveA fine sieve and the back of a ladle does the job the book intends. A blender gives a smoother purée but you still want to strain out clove, peppercorn and skin.
- Twenty minutes is for the aromaticsCanned tomatoes are already cooked; the simmer is only to draw out the clove, onion and parsley. Longer does not improve it.
- YieldAbout three cups, or three small first-course servings.
- The variationsThe substitution note works, but starchy purées -- potato, parsnip, peas -- are not acidic and need no soda at all. Skip that step for anything but tomato.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to the era when canned tomatoes became cheap and reliable enough to be a pantry staple in ordinary American households: a pint of milk, a spoonful of flour and half a can of tomatoes feed several people. The soda trick is often associated with the Boston Cooking School tradition of the 1880s and 1890s, offered as insurance against curdling, though careful temperature control and a starch-thickened sauce do the same work without the off taste. It is worth noting that the same period produced the commercial condensed version that made the soup a household fixture; the home recipe here has its clove and parsley infusion. The closing paragraph -- one method, a dozen vegetables -- is characteristic of the cookery-school approach, which prized rules a student could carry from dish to dish over recipes to be memorised.