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Cream of Tomato Soup
1 can tomatoes 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup flour 3 teaspoons salt 1 quart milk Cover, and stew the tomatoes slowly one-half hour to an hour; add speck of soda, and rub through a strainer. Make a white sauce, and add the strained tomato slowly. One-third cream instead of all milk may be used, and adds to the flavor. When cream is used, two tablespoons of butter is all that is necessary.
Condensed tomato may be used advantageously in this recipe, in which case use one and one-quarter cups condensed tomato and an equal quantity of water. It is not necessary to cook this before adding to the white sauce, except to bring it to the boiling point. The pinch of soda must be added, however, to counteract the acidity of the tomatoes.
A straightforward roux-thickened tomato soup from the era when curdling was the cook's chief anxiety. Two things in the original need translating: the can size and the amount of salt.
- The hinge: tomato into sauce, not sauce into tomatoAdd the strained tomato to the finished white sauce slowly, off a hard boil, exactly as written. Pouring milk or cream into hot acid, or letting the combined soup boil hard afterward, is what breaks it into curds.
- "1 can tomatoes"In this period that most often meant a can of somewhere between a pint and a half and a quart; the standardised No. 2 / No. 3 can designations came later. A modern 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes with its juice is a reasonable match and gives about 3 cups before straining.
- The speck of sodaA pinch of baking soda neutralizes some of the tomato acid and was the standard insurance against curdling. Use no more than about 1/8 teaspoon for a can of tomatoes; excess soda tastes soapy and flattens the tomato flavor. It also foams, so add it to the tomatoes off the heat.
- SaltThree teaspoons for the whole pot is more than modern taste wants; canned tomatoes of the period were often packed unsalted. Modern canned tomatoes and purees are usually already salted, so start with one teaspoon and correct at the end.
- "Condensed tomato"This means canned tomato puree, not condensed tomato soup. One and a quarter cups of puree plus an equal amount of water, brought just to a boil, replaces the stewed and strained fresh-canned tomatoes.
- The white sauceOne-third cup each of butter and flour to a quart of milk makes a thin-to-medium white sauce. Cook the roux two or three minutes over medium heat before adding the milk so the soup does not taste pasty.
- Stewing timeThe half hour to an hour applies to whole canned tomatoes and helps them break down for straining. Twenty minutes is usually enough with modern canned tomatoes.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or six to eight servings. Press the tomato pulp firmly through a sieve rather than discarding it; a food mill does the job faster than a strainer and spoon.
Cream of tomato soup depended entirely on the canning industry, and its rise in American cookbooks tracks the spread of cheap canned tomatoes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: the recipe assumes a can as a matter of course, not a fresh tomato in sight. The soda trick, common in books of this period, reflects a genuine problem cooks faced before they understood that gentle heat and adding acid to dairy rather than dairy to acid would do the same work.