Barley Soup
1/2 cup pearl barley 1 cup strained tomatoes or 1/3 cup condensed tomatoes 1 quart water 2 teaspoons salt 2 tablespoons Japanese Soy 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon sugar 1 bay leaf 1/2 teaspoon celery salt Cook the barley in the boiling, salted water together with the strained tomato and bay leaf until tender, keeping covered while cooking. Add the celery salt, sugar and Soy. Blend the flour and butter. Pour a little of the hot soup into them, stirring meanwhile; then turn back into the remainder of the ingredients, and cook five minutes.
A simple pearl barley and tomato soup thickened at the end with a butter-and-flour paste. Two of its ingredients need translating before you shop.
- "Condensed tomatoes"This means reduced tomato pulp sold in cans, roughly what we call tomato puree (passata-thick, not the dense paste in tubes). Use 1/3 cup puree, or the full cup of strained fresh or canned tomato as the first option allows.
- "Japanese Soy"Ordinary soy sauce, shoyu. Some cookbooks of the period distinguished it from Chinese soy and treated it as a table condiment. Two tablespoons is a lot of added sodium on top of 2 teaspoons salt and celery salt, so salt the water lightly and correct at the end.
- Barley timingHalf a cup of pearl barley in a quart of water takes 40 to 50 minutes at a bare simmer to go tender. It will drink a good deal of the liquid and thicken the soup on its own; keep a kettle of hot water nearby to loosen it.
- Keep it coveredThe instruction to cook covered is not incidental. Uncovered, the quart reduces well past soup consistency before the grain softens.
- Acid and grainTomato slows the softening of barley slightly. If yours is stubborn, the acid is why; simmer longer rather than raising the heat.
- The beurre manieBlending the butter and flour raw and tempering with hot soup is a beurre manie, not a roux. It must boil for the stated five minutes or the soup keeps a raw-flour taste.
- Bay leafFish it out before the final thickening. The recipe never says so.
- YieldAbout a quart to five cups finished, serving four as a first course.
Meatless cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on barley, lentils and dried peas, the grains and pulses that gave body to a soup without a meat stock behind it. What makes this particular recipe of its moment is the soy sauce: bottled "Japanese Soy" was available to American cooks, and soy sauce had in fact been known to English-language cooks well before this period; it is often said that vegetarian and reform cooks turned to it for the dark, savoury depth that beef broth otherwise provided. Paired here with sugar, celery salt and tomato, it can be read as an early anticipation of what we would now call umami seasoning, though the concept and the term itself postdate the recipe. The finishing paste of butter and flour is standard period technique, generally traced to the French kitchen and used in American household manuals to give a thin soup the coating quality of a richer one.