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Cream of Tomato Soup
1 quart tomatoes 1/4 teaspoon soda 4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 1 quart milk 1 tablespoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper Stew tomatoes slowly one-half hour; rub through strainer; heat and add soda. In the meantime, melt butter and stir in flour; cook over low flame, adding milk slowly, until thick; add seasoning. Take from fire and stir in hot tomatoes and serve immediately.
A straightforward cream soup built on a white sauce, with the tomato added at the last possible moment. Two details in the original carry all the weight: the soda and the order of combining.
- Add the tomato to the milk, not the reverseThe instruction to take the pan from the fire and stir the hot tomato into the hot white sauce is the hinge of the recipe. Pouring milk into acid tomato, or holding the combined soup over heat, curdles it. Combine off the flame and serve at once.
- What the soda is doingThe quarter teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk from breaking. It will fizz when it hits the purée, so leave a little headroom in the pan. More than the stated amount tends to flatten the tomato flavour and leave a soapy edge.
- A quart of tomatoesThis means roughly 2 lb of fresh tomatoes, stewed and sieved, or two 14-15 oz cans with their juice. Canned tomatoes need only about 15 minutes of simmering rather than the full half hour.
- Rub through a strainerThe straining removes skin and seeds, which a blender will not. If you purée instead, pass the result through a sieve or you will get a gritty soup.
- The salt is highA tablespoon of salt for two quarts of soup reads as very salty by current taste, particularly with canned tomatoes and salted butter. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Low flame means lowFour tablespoons each of butter and flour make a fairly thin roux for a quart of milk. Cook it a minute or two before adding liquid to lose the raw flour taste, and add the milk in stages, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving six as a first course or four as a main.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to the era when the roux-thickened white sauce was the backbone of American home cooking, taught in cookery schools as a single technique that could be turned into a dozen soups by changing only the flavouring. The soda trick is the period's standard answer to the curdling problem, and it turns up in household manuals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; commercial condensed tomato soup, on the market from the late 1890s, made the dish familiar enough that cooks expected to be able to produce it at home.