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Cream of Tomato Soup
1 qt. can of tomatoes. 1 cup water. 1 pt. cream sauce. 1 pt. milk. Turn tomatoes into spider. Stew with one cup of water until soft enough to mash through strainer. Add one scant teaspoon of soda to tomatoes before taking from fire. Have cream sauce ready. Add cup of milk to sauce and then tomatoes. Stir until well blended. Serve with cracker dust. The water can be left out of tomatoes if they have plenty of liquid.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make a white sauce and why soda goes into tomatoes. Two of its terms have dropped out of use entirely.
- The hinge: the sodaThe scant teaspoon of baking soda is there to neutralize enough of the tomato acid that the milk and sauce will not curdle when combined. The recipe adds it while the tomatoes are still on the fire; it will foam, so add it slowly and off the boil, and do not increase it — excess soda flattens the tomato flavor and can leave a soapy, metallic edge.
- SpiderAn old name for a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for standing over coals. Any wide saucepan or skillet works; wide is genuinely better here, since the tomatoes reduce faster.
- Cream sauceA medium white sauce: butter and flour cooked together in roughly equal measure (about 2 tablespoons of each per cup of milk), then the milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. The recipe calls for a pint of it, plus another pint of milk (the text says "cup" mid-recipe — the ingredient list's pint is the safer reading, and the soup is thick either way).
- Canned tomatoesA quart can is about 28 to 32 ounces, so one large modern can. Whole tomatoes packed in juice come closest to what she had; if they are already swimming in liquid, skip the added water as she suggests.
- StrainingPressing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth soup. A food mill does the same job faster and still catches seeds and skin, which a blender will not.
- Assembly orderCombine warm with warm and add the tomato to the milk mixture rather than the reverse, stirring steadily. Once blended, heat gently — a hard boil after the dairy goes in will break the sauce regardless of the soda.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed soda or oyster crackers, sprinkled over each bowl. Coarsely crushed saltines are the direct modern equivalent.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or six to eight first-course servings.
Cream of tomato soup was well established on the American table by the time this book appeared in 1920, and the canning industry is a large part of the reason: cheap year-round tomatoes in tin made it a soup you could produce in February, and Campbell's condensed tomato soup, launched in 1897, had already trained a generation to expect it. The soda trick belongs to that same moment: cooks knew from experience that tomato and milk fight each other, and alkali was the standard household fix before anyone explained it in terms of casein and pH. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal in Philadelphia and had built her reputation on First World War food conservation, which shows in the economy of the method here: one can of tomatoes, a flour-thickened sauce, and cracker dust for the garnish.