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Soups (Pint stewed or canned tomatoes)
1 pint stewed or canned tomatoes 1 pint cream stock 1 tablespoon sugar Pinch of baking soda Heat the tomatoes; strain and add sugar and a pinch of baking soda. At the moment of serving stir in the boiling cream sauce, . At the moment of serving stir in the boiling cream sauce, very slowly to prevent curdling. A spoonful of whipped cream may be served on the top of each plate if desired.
A cream of tomato soup that lives or dies on one step: how the acid tomato and the milk are brought together. The rest is a five-minute job.
- The hinge: combine at the last secondBoth liquids should be hot (the recipe specifies the cream sauce boiling), and it goes into the tomato slowly, at the moment of serving. Soup held on the stove after combining is much more likely to curdle, soda or no soda.
- "Cream stock" means a white sauceThe text calls it stock in one line and cream sauce in the next, and gives no proportions; both most likely mean a thin b ablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour cooked together with a pint of milk. The flour helps stabilise the mixture against the tomato acid.
- The pinch of sodaBaking soda neutralises some of the tomato's acid so the milk proteins are less likely to break. A pinch means a pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon at most. More than that gives a soapy, flat taste and dulls the colour to brick.
- StrainingHeat the tomatoes first, then press them through a sieve, as the recipe directs. With modern canned tomatoes a stick blender plus a quick pass through a strainer gets you there faster.
- The sugarA full tablespoon reads as a lot now; taste after a teaspoon and add more only if the soup bites.
- Quantities and yieldA pint is two cups, so this makes about a quart — four modest first-course servings, two as a main. Salt is not mentioned anywhere and the soup needs it; season the finished pot, not the tomato.
- The whipped cream garnishThe recipe offers it as optional, spooned on each plate. It sinks into the surface quickly, so add it after the soup is in the bowls.
Cream of tomato soup became a fixture of American home cooking only after canned tomatoes were cheap and everywhere, which is to say after the 1880s — a pint of "stewed or canned tomatoes" in a loose-leaf cook book of this era assumes a pantry shelf rather than a garden. The trick of a pinch of soda was standard advice in domestic-science teaching of the period, when the chemistry of curdling was newly explained to housekeepers. Entries like this one are terse, sometimes duplicated mid-line, and written for someone who already knows what a cream sauce is.