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Soup (Pint stewed or canned tomatoes)
1 pint stewed or canned tomatoes 1 pint water or stock 1 small onion Salt and pepper 1 bay leaf 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour Put the tomatoes over the fire with the water, onion and bay leaf; cook slowly for one half hour; strain through a fine sieve; wash the saucepan; return the tomatoes to it and put again over the fire. Add the butter and flour well rubbed together; stir until smooth; season to taste and serve with Croutons.
VEGETABLE SOUP No. 1 1½ ounces butter 1 small onion 1/2 carrot 1/2 stalk celery 1 cup beans or split peas 2 quarts water Pinch of mace Salt and pepper 1 dozen allspice Put the butter in a large kettle over a slow fire. While it is melting slice the onion, cut the carrot and celery into small pieces, and put them in the butter, covering them closely until they are slightly browned. Have ready the beans or peas which have been soaked in cold water all night, and bring them to a boil in a quart of water. When the vegetables are browned pour the boiling peas over them; add another quart of water; bring all to a boil; skim well and add the seasoning. Cover the kettle and let it simmer for three hours. Then strain the vegetables and press them through a colander. Return all to the kettle; bring to a boil and serve.
VEGETABLE SOUP No. 2 1/2 cup chopped onion 1 tablespoon butter or drippings 1½ quarts water 2 cups shredded cabbage 1/2 cup chopped carrot 1 leek 1 tablespoon chopped pepper 1½ teaspoons salt 1 saltspoon pepper 1 tomato 1 cup sliced potato 1 tablespoon chopped celery Brown the onion slightly in the butter or drippings. Have the water boiling hard and add all the vegetables except the potato and tomato. Boil rapidly for ten minutes; then gently for one hour. Add the other ingredients and cook one hour longer. Have the cover partially off the kettle during the entire time.
Three plain soups sharing a page: a strained tomato soup thickened with beurre manié, and two vegetable soups, one puréed and one left brothy. All three are workable as written, with a few nineteenth-century conventions to translate.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon. In Vegetable Soup No. 2 that is the only pepper called for, so taste and adjust at the end.
- A dozen allspiceThese are whole allspice berries, not ground. Twelve berries plus a pinch of mace in two quarts is assertive; tie them in cheesecloth so you can pull them before the soup is pressed through the colander.
- The butter and flourEqual parts butter and flour rubbed cold into a paste is beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Whisk it into the simmering tomato in small pinches and keep stirring, or it will sit in lumps. One tablespoon of each thickens a quart only lightly, which is the intent.
- Why the pan is washedThe recipe gives no reason; presumably a film left by the reduced tomato and onion can scorch once the soup is thickened. Washing the saucepan before returning the strained puree is worth doing rather than skipping.
- Canned tomatoesA pint is two cups, roughly one 15-ounce can plus its liquid. Modern canned tomatoes are less watery and often already seasoned; if using whole peeled, crush them first so the half hour is enough to break them down.
- Soaking and cooking timesThe overnight soak in No. 1 still matters for whole dried beans; split peas need no soak and will collapse in well under the three hours given. Older dried beans may want longer than three hours, so test before straining.
- The uncovered kettleNo. 2 asks that the lid be partly off for the whole two hours. That is deliberate reduction and concentration; a tight lid gives a thin, flat soup. Expect to lose a fair amount of the quart and a half.
- YieldThe tomato soup makes about a quart. Both vegetable soups start from one and a half to two quarts of water. Neither recipe states a number of servings.
Strained tomato soup thickened with butter and flour was a familiar form of "tomato purée" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it depended entirely on the canned tomato, which by 1900 was among the cheapest and most reliable canned goods in America, allowing the recipe to use "stewed or canned." The two vegetable soups show the older logic of the household kettle rather than the restaurant stockpot: No. 1 browns its aromatics in butter, extends them with soaked pulses, and pushes everything through a colander to make a thick meatless purée that could stand as the substance of a meal; No. 2 keeps its vegetables in pieces and stages them so the potato and tomato go in last.