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Tomato Soup with Stock
2 tablespoons chopped onion 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons green pepper 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 sprig parsley bit of bay leaf 2 cups brown stock salt and cayenne 2 tablespoons horesradish 1/4 cup cooked macaroni cut in rings Melt butter, add green pepper and onion, cook five minutes; add tomato, horseradish, stock, and seasonings. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Simmer ten minutes, strain, add macaroni and serve. This soup unstrained would be a purée. 2 cups hot mashed turnip 1 cup hot mashed potato 2 tablespoons flour 2 teaspoons salt
The ingredient list has come through the scanner damaged: tomato is called for in the method but has no listed quantity, the "2 tablespoons green pepper" and "2 tablespoons horesradish" are typos-in-place, and the last four lines (turnip, potato, flour, salt) belong to the following recipe and have nothing to do with this soup.
- The missing tomatoThe method adds tomato but the list omits it. Any reconstruction is a guess; roughly 2 cups of canned tomatoes with their juice, or about 1 lb of fresh tomatoes chopped, is a reasonable match for 2 cups of stock.
- Ignore the last four lines"2 cups hot mashed turnip, 1 cup hot mashed potato, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 teaspoons salt" is the head of a separate recipe. Adding it here would give you a thick vegetable mash, not a strained soup.
- Brown stockBeef or veal bones roasted before simmering, which is what gives the soup its colour and body. A good low-sodium beef broth stands in; hold back on salt, since the strained soup is seasoned to taste.
- HorseradishThe book most likely means grated fresh root, sharper and drier than jarred prepared horseradish, which is cut with vinegar (creamed versions add dairy). If using prepared, start with a tablespoon and taste after simmering, since the heat fades with cooking.
- The roux is added lateButter and flour are cooked together separately and stirred in after the tomato and stock, not at the start. Cook it to a pale blond and whisk it into the hot liquid in pieces so it disperses without lumping.
- Strain, then macaroniThe straining is the point of the dish: it removes pepper, onion, bay, parsley and tomato solids and leaves a clear-bodied broth in which the macaroni rings show. Cook the macaroni separately and add it at the last minute or it clouds the soup and goes soft.
- Macaroni cut in ringsPeriod macaroni came as long hollow tubes to be cut down at home. Ditalini or short-cut tubetti gives the same effect with no knife work.
- CayenneA pinch, added with the salt and the other seasonings before the simmer, as the recipe directs. It is easy to overshoot, so add sparingly and taste after straining.
- YieldTwo cups of stock plus the tomato makes roughly three to four small first-course servings after straining.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it wrapped its chocolate chapters in a general-purpose kitchen manual — hence a soup chapter with no cocoa in sight. The dish belongs to the American handling of tomato soup, which ran alongside the milk-thickened cream of tomato that Campbell's condensed soup would make ubiquitous; this stock-based version sits closer to a French potage. The closing note — "This soup unstrained would be a purée" — is a small lesson in the classifying instinct of period cookery writers, who kept bouillon, consommé, purée and bisque as distinct named categories and expected a cook to know which she was making.