Home › Soups › Tomato and Barley Soup
Tomato and Barley Soup
2 pounds fresh tomatoes 2 ounces butter 2 quarts water 1 teacup of pearl barley 4 ounces onions Salt, pepper Brown the butter, put in the onions cut in small pieces, and try until tender, and then add 2 quarts of boiling water; add the tomatoes peeled by scalding them, and the barley, and cook four hours. Strain. Some milk added a few minutes before serving improves it.
A plain vegetable soup built on the long, slow barley simmer typical of pre-1920 meatless cookery. The quantities work; the timing and the straining are what need thought.
- A teacup of barleyPeriod teacup measures vary; they are commonly reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 of a standard cup. Taking the larger figure, that is roughly 5 oz of pearl barley to 2 quarts of water, which thickens considerably over a long cook.
- "Try until tender"An older use of "try" meaning to render or fry gently. Cook the onions in the butter until soft and lightly coloured, not browned hard.
- Browning the butterThe recipe wants the butter taken past melted to nut-brown before the onions go in. Watch it closely at this stage; milk solids go from brown to burnt in seconds and the whole soup carries the flavour.
- Four hoursPearl barley is fully soft in 40 to 50 minutes. The long cook most likely serves to break the grain down entirely for pushing through a sieve; if you plan to leave it unstrained, an hour to ninety minutes should do. Top up with water either way, as the liquid will reduce over so long a simmer.
- Straining, or not'Strain' may mean forcing the soup through a sieve for a smooth purée rather than discarding the solids, though the text does not say which is meant. A blender will do the sieving work in seconds.
- TomatoesTwo pounds of ripe fresh tomatoes, scalded and skinned as directed. Out of season, a 28 oz tin of whole tomatoes with their juice is closer to the intended result than pale fresh ones.
- The milk at the endAdd it off the boil and warm through only. Tomato acid plus a hard boil will curdle milk; a splash of cream is more forgiving if that worries you.
- YieldSix generous servings as a first course. Salt at the end, after straining and after the milk, since the reduction concentrates whatever you add early.
The recipe is meatless and built on barley, a cheap thickener that gives a soup some of the body meat stock would otherwise supply, and such soups are common in the soup chapters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books. The long simmer and the final straining belong to a kitchen with no mechanical means of pureeing, so time did the work a blender does now. The finishing splash of milk anticipates modern cream of tomato soup, though here it is offered as an improvement rather than a requirement.