Tomato Soup
Half bushel ripe tomatoes, bunch of celery, 14 Bay leaves, 14 sprigs of parsley, 10 small onions, 50 whole cloves, 2 peppers (hot), 2 cups of bread flour, half cup salt, one pound of butter, 2½ cups brown sugar. Cut tomatoes, celery, parsley, onions and peppers; add cloves, salt and bay leaves; cook until soft; strain and add sugar. Melt butter and add flour and smooth with a little soup. Add to the whole and cook until quite thick. Put in glass jars and dilute about one-third with milk, stock or hot water when served.
— Catherine Wagner
This is a concentrated tomato soup base intended to be put up in jars and kept, and that is where it fails by current standards. The cooking itself is straightforward; the storage is not.
- Open-kettle canningThe recipe fills glass jars with hot soup and stops there — no boiling-water bath, no pressure processing, no time, no temperature. This method, once standard, is no longer considered safe for anything; jars sealed by hot fill alone routinely fail to reach or hold a lethal temperature.
- Why this particular soup is high riskOnions, celery and parsley are low-acid vegetables, and adding them, along with butter and sugar, to the tomatoes dilutes the acidity that protects plain canned tomatoes; fat also shields spores from heat. Sealed in an oxygen-free jar at room temperature, that is the environment Clostridium botulinum requires. Botulinum toxin is odourless and tasteless and is not detectable by inspection.
- Flour and butter block heatA soup thickened with a roux of a pound of butter and two cups of flour conducts heat very poorly. Even with a processing time, heat would not penetrate reliably to the centre of the jar — which is why current guidance does not permit home canning of thickened, fat-enriched or floured soups at all.
- Tomato varieties have changedTomato acidity varies by cultivar and ripeness, and it is often said that some modern varieties are less acidic than older ones; either way, present-day canning directions specify added lemon juice or citric acid for plain tomatoes. Nothing here acidifies the mixture.
- If you want to keep itA soup base of this kind can be cooked and frozen rather than shelf-stored, or made fresh in a small batch and eaten within a few days. For anything going into jars for the pantry, use a current tested recipe with stated processing times.
- Half a bushelFor scale: a bushel of tomatoes runs roughly 53 lb, so this calls for something over 25 lb of fruit — a full canning-day batch, not a supper's worth. The fourteen bay leaves and fifty cloves are proportionate to that quantity, not to a saucepan.
- The dilution noteThe finished product is a concentrate, meant to be let down by about a third with milk, stock or water at the table. Judged as flavouring, two and a half cups of brown sugar across that much tomato is less sweet than it first reads.
History: Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of recipes like this one: not a dish for dinner but a season's worth of preserving. The Philathea classes were adult Bible-study groups for young women, a counterpart of the Baraca classes for young men within the same movement, and their fundraising cookbooks gathered whatever the membership cooked — which in late summer meant putting up the tomato glut. Concentrated tomato soup to be diluted with milk was a household idea as well as a commercial one, and the roux, the whole cloves and the brown sugar suggest a cook's own version rather than an imitation of anything tinned. It also shows the period's confidence in the sealed glass jar as a preservation method in itself, a confidence that later bacteriology did not support.