Creole Soup
1/2 quart can tomatoes or 3/4 cup condensed tomatoes 2 tablespoons rice 1 small turnip 1 small carrot 1 large onion 2 cups water 1 tablespoon butter 2 teaspoons salt Peel, and slice the turnip, carrot and onion. Cook these vegetables with the rice, tomato and salt, in the water. When the vegetables are tender, rub all through a colander. Add the butter, and, if necessary, water sufficient to make one quart. Season with paprika and cayenne and heat thoroughly before serving.
A plain purée soup that depends entirely on how far you cook the vegetables down and how aggressively you season it at the end. Everything before the last sentence is groundwork.
- The tomato measuresA half-quart can is 2 cups of canned tomatoes with their juice — one standard 14.5 oz can is close enough. "Condensed tomatoes" meant the thick reduced pulp sold in cans, roughly today's tomato purée; 3/4 cup of purée is the equivalent.
- Rub through a colanderA colander here does the work of a food mill: the softened vegetables are pressed through with the back of a spoon and the skins and fibres stay behind. A food mill on the medium plate gives the same texture. A blender or stick blender will also work but leaves tomato skin flecks unless you sieve after.
- Cooking timeThe recipe gives none. Sliced turnip, carrot and onion with rice in 2 cups of water want a covered simmer of about 30 to 35 minutes — the rice must be well past done, since it is there as a thickener rather than as a grain.
- SaltTwo teaspoons in a quart of soup is on the high side by current taste, and many canned tomatoes carry added salt as well. Start with one teaspoon and correct at the end.
- The seasoning is the pointPaprika and cayenne are added off-list at the finish and no quantity is given. Around 1/2 teaspoon paprika and a pinch to 1/4 teaspoon cayenne per quart gives the colour and the low heat the name implies. Add them to the hot soup and let it stand a minute before tasting; cayenne blooms.
- ConsistencyAfter sieving you top up with water to make a quart. If it looks thin, hold back some of the water — the rice starch settles and the soup thickens as it stands and reheats.
- YieldOne quart, which is three modest servings or four small first-course bowls.
"Creole" on an early twentieth-century American menu often signalled less a claim of Louisiana provenance than a shorthand for tomato, onion and a definite prickle of red pepper - the same logic that produced Creole sauce, Creole eggs and Creole rice in general cookbooks of the period, many of them written far from New Orleans. The rice is the quiet workhorse - sieved along with the vegetables, it gives body without the butter-and-flour roux or the meat stock that a comparable cream soup would have demanded.