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Tomato Soup
1 can tomatoes 2 cups water 1 carrot 1 small onion 1 bay leaf 2 cloves 1 teaspoon salt Dash of red pepper 1 quart soup stock Add water to tomatoes. Dice carrot and slice onion; add these and the seasoning. Boil five minutes and place in cooker for two hours. Strain, add soup stock, reheat and serve. Use one radiator or cook a longer time.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the pot is brought to a boil on the range, then transferred to an insulated box where retained heat finishes the job. The technique translates cleanly to modern equipment, but a few of the quantities need pinning down.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated box, usually packed with felt, asbestos or hay, into which a boiling pot is sealed to cook on stored heat. The "radiator" is a soapstone or cast-iron disc heated red on the range and set under or over the pot to add heat the food itself cannot supply.
- The hinge: it must be boiling when it goes inEverything depends on the pot entering the cooker at a full boil and the lid going down at once. A pot that has cooled on the counter while you fetch the stone will spend two hours in the lukewarm range where bacteria multiply. In a modern kitchen use a low burner, a 200F oven, a slow cooker on low, or a vacuum thermal cooker preheated with boiling water.
- "One can tomatoes"Can sizes were not standardised in the way they are now, and period tomato cans ranged from roughly a pint to roughly a quart. Somewhere between a 14.5 oz and a 28 oz can will work; the larger the can, the heavier the soup unless you increase the stock.
- Soup stockHousehold stock at this period was usually a home-made bone broth, often beef or veal. Use a good unsalted beef or chicken stock and taste for salt at the end, since the teaspoon called for assumes an unseasoned quart.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chile flakes. A dash means a pinch of the ground spice, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon.
- The cloves and bayTwo whole cloves, not ground. They and the bay leaf are removed at the straining step, so there is no need to bag them.
- StrainingThe instruction is to strain, which gives a thin, clear-bodied soup in the period style. Pressing the softened carrot, onion and tomato through the sieve, or blending before straining, gives a fuller texture.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of liquid before straining, depending on the size of the can of tomatoes, so a generous six to eight first-course cups.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households from about 1905 through the First World War, when fuel economy was both a domestic virtue and, briefly, a patriotic one. The principle is older than the appliance: the haybox, in which a boiling pot is buried in insulating straw, was long used in northern Europe, and commercial fireless cookers simply put a felt-lined, latching version of it in the kitchen. Manufacturers sold them with soapstone "radiators" that could be heated in the range fire and slipped in beside the pot, which is the extra heat this recipe calls for when it says use one radiator. A soup like this one, mostly vegetables and canned tomato, suits the method: it needs long gentle heat and nothing that scorches, and the finished stock could be added at the last minute.