Tomato Bisque
1 quart can tomatoes 1 pint water 2 teaspoons salt 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar 3 two-inch sticks cinnamon 3 slices lemon 1 tablespoon butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup cream Cook the tomato, sugar, cinnamon, lemon and salt together for twenty minutes. Put through a colander, and bind with the butter and flour. Boil five minutes; add the hot cream, and serve at once.
If preferred, bay leaf and onion may be used for seasoning in preference to the cinnamon and lemon.
Condensed tomato may be used in this recipe, in which case use one and one-quarter cups of condensed tomatoes and an additional two and one-half cups water.
A straightforward cream-of-tomato soup whose only real difficulty is the last step: acid tomato and dairy curdle at the slightest provocation.
- Keep the cream from breakingHeat the cream separately, take the thickened tomato off direct heat, and stir the hot cream in at the end as written. Do not let the soup boil once the cream is in, and do not add cold cream to hot tomato.
- A quart can of tomatoesRoughly a 28- to 32-ounce can, juice included. Whole peeled plum tomatoes with their liquid are the closest match to the packed product of the period.
- "Condensed tomato"This means concentrated tomato pulp, closer to today's canned purée than to paste, not condensed tomato soup. If you substitute modern paste you will need to thin it further and cut the salt.
- Bind with butter and flourThe flour is three times the butter by volume here, so work the tablespoon of butter and three tablespoons of flour together and whisk it into the strained tomato in small pieces. Cooking it five minutes takes the raw flour taste out.
- Colander means sieveA modern colander has holes far too large. Push the cooked tomato through a fine sieve or food mill; the point is to remove skins, seeds, cinnamon bark and lemon rind in one pass.
- Salt and sugarCanned tomatoes of the period were generally packed without added salt, which likely explains the two teaspoons; with modern salted tomatoes start with half that and correct at the end. The tablespoon and a half of sugar is there to balance the acid, and is worth keeping if your tomatoes are sharp.
- The cinnamon-and-lemon seasoningUnusual to modern palates and quite assertive; three two-inch sticks in six cups of soup gives a distinctly spiced, almost mulled flavour. The bay-leaf-and-onion variant the recipe offers is the safer choice if you are serving this as a first course.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four to six as a starter.
Tomato bisque of this kind belongs to the era when "bisque" had loosened from its older meaning of a shellfish soup thickened with the pounded shells, and came to mean any smooth, cream-enriched purée. The cinnamon and lemon are the tell of an older American habit: through the nineteenth century canned and stewed tomatoes were routinely treated as something between a vegetable and a fruit, sugared and spiced much as one would spice a preserve, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s are sometimes said to season tomato soup with clove, mace or cinnamon.