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Tomato and Celery Soup
1 cup celery cut into half-inch pieces 1 pint water 1 quart tomatoes 1 tablespoon sugar 2 teaspoons salt 1 1/2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter 1 bay leaf Rub the contents of a quart can of tomatoes through a colander. Boil together the celery, water, strained tomato, bay leaf, sugar and salt. When celery is tender, bind the ingredients by rubbing the flour and butter together and pouring over it a little at a time, some of the warm--not scalding--soup. When thoroughly blended, stir into the remainder of the soup, and cook. Boil gently for five minutes. Remove the bay leaf; add sufficient water to make one and one-half quarts soup.
A straightforward puree-thickened soup that needs only a few translations of measure and one technique note.
- The hinge: tempering the flour-butterThe flour and butter are kneaded raw into a paste (beurre manié) and slackened with warm soup before going into the pot. If the soup is scalding when you add it, the flour seizes into lumps rather than dissolving; keep it below a simmer for that step, then return the pot to the heat and boil gently five minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- A quart of tomatoesA quart can of tomatoes is about 32 fluid ounces. Modern cans run 28 oz, so use one 28-oz can plus a splash of its liquid, or roughly 2 lb of fresh tomatoes cooked down briefly. Rubbing through a colander is a coarse strain: it holds back skins and cores, though a colander's holes are wide enough that many seeds pass through with the pulp.
- Measures1 pint is 2 cups, 1 quart is 4 cups. The finished volume of 1 1/2 quarts is 6 cups, which serves six as a first course.
- SaltTwo teaspoons suits tomatoes canned without salt. Most canned tomatoes today already carry salt, so add half and correct at the end.
- CeleryHalf-inch pieces from the outer ribs will be tender in 15 to 20 minutes of gentle boiling. Included leaves add a good deal of flavor and can be pulled out with the bay leaf.
- Sugar and acidityThe tablespoon of sugar is there to offset the acidity of canned tomatoes, not to sweeten. Taste before adding all of it if your tomatoes are ripe or the can is a low-acid variety.
- ConsistencyWater is added at the end to reach volume, so judge thickness then rather than earlier. The soup thickens further as it stands and will want thinning if reheated.
Meatless cookery of this sort has an obvious context: American federal food conservation campaigns during the First World War urged households to observe meatless days, and vegetarian and Seventh-day Adventist cooks had been publishing recipes of this kind for decades. A tomato soup bound with flour and butter rather than built on meat stock is the kind of dish such cookery needed to demonstrate -- substantial, cheap, and dependent on the canned tomato, which was among the most widely packed commercially canned vegetables in the United States by 1900 and available year-round. The celery is doing the work a stock would otherwise do, supplying the savory, faintly bitter depth that keeps the tomato from tasting flat; the bay leaf is the whole of the seasoning beyond salt and sugar, which is characteristic of plain American cookery of the period rather than any lack of ambition.