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Mock Bisque Soup
2 cups tomatoes 1 saltspoon soda 4 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour or cornstarch Salt and pepper Steam the tomatoes until soft enough to strain the juice; strain, add soda, and allow gases to pass off. This prevents the tomato curdling the milk. Scald the milk; melt the butter, add the flour, and pour on gradually the scalding milk. Cook thoroughly, stirring carefully.
Add the tomatoes to the milk, reheat and season to taste; strain, and serve immediately with crackers or croutons.
A cream of tomato soup built on a thin white sauce, from a period when "bisque" meant a smooth, rich soup rather than specifically a shellfish one. The whole recipe turns on keeping the milk from curdling.
- The hinge: add tomato to milk, not milk to tomatoThe recipe pours the strained tomato into the hot white sauce rather than the reverse. Add it gradually while stirring, reheat only briefly, season, and serve at once; letting the combined soup sit or boil is generally held to encourage the grainy curdled texture the soda guards against.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is the correct dose here — more baking soda than that will strip the tomato of its brightness and leave a flat, faintly soapy taste.
- Why the soda works, and why it is optionalThe soda neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk proteins from clotting; the fizzing is carbon dioxide, and the recipe rightly tells you to let it subside before proceeding. A well-thickened white sauce and quick service will usually do the job on their own, so the soda is insurance rather than necessity.
- Tomatoes"2 cups tomatoes" may mean canned as well as fresh, though the instruction to steam them until soft enough to strain suggests fresh fruit. A 14–15 oz can, juice included, is a rough equivalent; steaming is only needed for fresh.
- Flour or cornstarchThree tablespoons of flour to four cups of milk gives a light, pourable soup. Cornstarch is usually reckoned to thicken about twice as strongly as flour, so use less; many cooks slake it in cold milk, though this recipe offers it interchangeably with flour in the melted butter.
- Cook the roux outThe recipe's "cook thoroughly" comes after the milk goes in. Give the butter and flour a couple of minutes bubbling together first, then several minutes of gentle simmering once the milk is added. Under-cooked flour is a common reason a soup like this tastes pasty.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to about 180°F, just to a shimmer with bubbles at the rim, not boiled. It is added hot so the sauce comes together quickly and smoothly.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four as a first course. It does not reheat gracefully — bring it back only to steaming, never to a boil.
"Mock" dishes are one of the signatures of Anglo-American domestic cookery, with mock turtle already established in eighteenth-century England and mock duck, mock oyster and mock bisque following in the same spirit. A true bisque was a shellfish soup, thickened traditionally with pounded rice or crustacean shells, and it was expensive; the tomato version borrowed the name for its colour, its smoothness and its air of the dining room, at a fraction of the cost. The name stuck so firmly that "tomato bisque" is now simply a category of soup rather than an imitation of anything. Such substitutions belong to the same impulse as the period's vegetarian and Lenten cookery, when the argument for going without flesh was as often economic and dietetic as it was ethical, and cooks wanted dishes that could stand in respectably for the ones they were replacing. The baking-soda trick against curdling was standard teaching in the cooking schools of the era, and Fannie Farmer's cream of tomato soup does use soda against curdling.