Creole Soup
1/4 cup rice 1/2 cup cut onion 2 tablespoons bacon drippings 2 cups tomatoes 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1/8 teaspoon paprika 1 tablespoon cut parsley Wash rice, add 3 cups boiling water and boil 30 minutes. Cook onions in pan with drippings until tender, but not brown; add tomatoes and boil 10 minutes; rub through strainer into boiled rice and water; add seasoning and sprinkle with parsley. A little chopped green pepper adds to the flavor.
A thin, brothy tomato-and-rice soup of the sort that filled out a lunch table cheaply. Nothing here is difficult, but two details — the rice and the salt — are worth adjusting before you start.
- The rice governs the textureThirty minutes at a full boil in 3 cups of water will burst long-grain rice and leave a starchy, cloudy soup, which is exactly what was wanted here: the grain is the thickener. If you want distinct grains, cook the rice 15-18 minutes and expect a thinner, brighter soup.
- SaltTwo teaspoons of salt for roughly five cups of finished soup is heavy by current taste, and canned tomatoes and bacon drippings both bring their own. Start with half and correct at the end.
- Tomatoes"2 cups tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their liquid; a 14.5 or 15 oz can is a little under 2 cups, close enough. The recipe does not say, and fresh will work if they are ripe and peeled, though the soup will be looser.
- Bacon drippingsThe rendered fat is the only savoury backbone in the pot; butter or oil will give you a noticeably flatter soup. If you have no drippings saved, render two slices of bacon and use the fat.
- "Rub through a strainer"This removes the tomato skins and seeds and was routine before smooth canned product existed. A food mill does it faster; with modern crushed or puréed tomatoes you can skip the step entirely.
- PaprikaIn American books of this kind paprika generally means the mild sweet sort, used as much for colour as for heat. An eighth of a teaspoon is a tint, not a seasoning -- cayenne is not the intent.
- Onions "tender, but not brown"Keep the heat moderate. Browning would push the soup toward a caramelised, French-onion flavour that fights the raw brightness of the tomato.
- YieldRoughly four to five cups depending on how hard it boils, enough for four as a first course. It thickens on standing; thin with water or stock when reheating.
"Creole" on an American recipe of this vintage was less a claim of Louisiana ancestry than a shorthand for tomatoes, onion, and a little pepper — the same convention that gave cookbooks Creole eggs, Creole macaroni and Creole sauce, most of them with no connection to New Orleans cooking beyond the trio of vegetables. The green pepper suggested at the end is the nearest gesture toward the actual Creole and Cajun aromatic base of onion, celery and bell pepper. The recipe also shows what a cookbook of the period expected of a household: rice, a can of tomatoes and a little saved bacon fat, stretched into a soup for four. Fat rendered from breakfast bacon was often kept in a crock by the stove and treated as an ingredient in its own right, a habit said to have persisted in many American kitchens well past the arrival of cheap vegetable shortening.