Tomato Soup
3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 4 cups water 3 cloves salt and cayenne Melt butter, add flour. Cook remaining ingredients together twenty minutes. Press through a sieve and thicken with flour mixture. If tomato lacks flavor, season highly with Worcestershire sauce and tabasco sauce. 1 can tomatoes 1 quart milk
The ingredient list here has been scrambled in setting — the milk and canned tomatoes ended up printed after the method — so read the whole thing before starting. Once reassembled it is a straightforward roux-thickened tomato soup.
- The ingredient list is brokenAs printed, the water and the quart of milk are both present, which is a quart more liquid than 2 tablespoons of flour will carry. The likelier reading is that this is one recipe with alternate liquids: simmer the tomatoes with water for a thin soup, or with milk for a cream version. Choose one; do not use both.
- 1 can tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied; "a can" in American books of this date could mean anything from roughly a pint to about a quart, so a modern 14.5-15 oz can is only a reasonable starting point. Whole peeled tomatoes with their juice are the right substitute; use two cans if you want a soup that tastes of tomato rather than of thickened stock.
- 3 clovesWhole cloves, not garlic. Three is assertive in four cups of liquid — they go in with the tomatoes and are strained out at the sieve stage, so nothing needs fishing out later.
- If you use milkTomato acid curdles milk. Thicken the milk with the butter-flour roux first, then add the strained hot tomato pulp to the white sauce off the boil, stirring — not the other way round. A pinch of baking soda in the tomato is the period fix and still works.
- Press through a sieveA food mill or a chinois with a ladle does this faster than a spoon and a strainer. A blender will not remove skins and seeds; if you blend, still pass it through mesh.
- Twenty minutesThat is enough for canned tomatoes, which are already cooked. Longer only dulls them. If the soup tastes flat, the fault is usually salt and a little sugar rather than time.
- Worcestershire and TabascoThe instruction to "season highly" was written for indifferent early canned tomatoes. With decent canned San Marzano or similar, a few drops of each is plenty.
- YieldRoughly 5 to 6 cups depending on can size; four to six modest first-course servings.
Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; like a number of branded cookbooks of its era it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a general household repertoire -- soups included. This tomato soup belongs to the American white-sauce school associated with the Boston Cooking School: butter and flour cooked together, a measured liquid, a strained puree, and seasoning added last. The recipe's assumption that "tomato lacks flavor" is a period detail worth noting; canned tomatoes were cheap and widely available by 1900, and contemporary cookbooks not infrequently suggest propping them up with bottled sauces. Worcestershire had been on the market since the late 1830s and Tabasco since about 1868, so both were long-established pantry items rather than novelties by the time this was written.