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Cream of Tomato
1 can tomato soup 1 cup cream or milk Heat the soup; stir in the cream or milk, preferably hot; add more seasoning if needed and a small piece of butter if milk is used instead of cream. Serve with salted wafers or buttered toast.
Dash of paprika Salt
A two-ingredient soup that depends entirely on which can you open and how gently you combine it. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the milk from curdling in the acid tomato.
- Condensed vs. ready-to-serveCanned tomato soup of this era was commonly condensed and sold to be thinned, though ready-to-serve tinned soups existed too. With a modern condensed can (10.75 oz), a cup of cream or milk is a little less liquid than the label dilution. With a ready-to-serve carton, use less dairy or the result will be thin and flat.
- Add the dairy to the tomato, warmCombine the two warm -- Tomato acid can curdle milk when the two meet over heat. The recipe has you heat the soup and then stir in the cream or milk, preferably hot; keep it off the boil and do not let the combined soup simmer.
- Cream over milkHigher fat is more stable against curdling, which is presumably why the recipe prefers cream and has you add a little butter if you use milk. Whole milk works; skim will separate more readily.
- Salted wafersThese are plain salted crackers, of the same family as the saltine. Buttered toast is the other accompaniment the recipe offers.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves seasoning to the cook ("add more seasoning if needed"). Taste after the dairy goes in, since milk mutes salt noticeably.
- YieldRoughly two to two and a half cups; two servings as a first course.
- Fireless cookeryHolding -- Held hot for a long stretch, tomato and milk will eventually separate; serve it soon after combining.
Cream of tomato belongs to the first generation of dishes built around a commercial can. Condensed tomato soup was one of the earliest and most successful canned soups in the United States, on the market from the late 1890s, and it seems often to have been treated less as a finished product than as a base -- something to be thinned, enriched and reseasoned at home. That is exactly what is happening here: the can supplies the tomato and the cook supplies the cream, butter, salt and paprika. Its appearance in a fireless cookery section is telling. The fireless cooker, an insulated box that finished food on stored heat, was generally promoted as a fuel-saving device, and recipes assigned to it were chosen for needing relatively little live flame. A soup you could bring to temperature and then leave to hold itself fit the appliance's argument perfectly.