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Tomato Bisque Soup
The contents of a can of American Tomato Bisque Soup will make 6 cups of delicious soup. Place 1¾ ounces of condensed soup in a fine china cup, and fill with very hot water. Fill the cup with hot water to warm it before using. Keep the condensed soup in a small, covered, silver-plated and use a silver-plated ladle.
This is fountain service rather than cookery: a single portion built in the cup from canned condensed soup and hot water. The whole result depends on the water being genuinely hot, since nothing else heats the soup.
- The measure per cupThe printed page gives 1¾ ounces of condensed soup per cup, as our text now reads. That figure is consistent with the stated yield of six cups from one can.
- Water temperature is the hingeDiluting cold condensate with merely warm water gives a lukewarm, separated cup. Use water as near boiling as you can get it, drawn fresh, and pour it in a thin stream while stirring so the solids disperse rather than clot.
- Warm the cup firstThe instruction to fill the cup with hot water and dump it before building the soup is not fussiness. A cold china cup will noticeably cool a single serving.
- "A fine china cup"Bouillon cups of the period were small, on the order of six to eight fluid ounces, smaller than a modern mug. Scale the condensate down if your cup is larger, or the soup will be thin.
- Silver-plated serviceThe original calls for a covered silver-plated container and ladle, the standard fountain fittings of the period. Any covered non-reactive vessel and a stainless ladle do the same job; acidic tomato will dull real silver.
- Holding the opened canThe recipe has the condensate kept covered and ready at the counter. Hot water alone does not pasteurize it, so keep opened condensed soup refrigerated and discard what is left at the end of the day.
- FinishingNothing is seasoned here; taste the diluted cup and adjust with salt and a grind of pepper, and a spoonful of cream if it tastes thin.
- YieldSix cups from one can, which at fountain portions means six single servings, not six bowls.
Soda fountains needed something to sell in January, and from the 1890s onward the answer was hot beverages served from the same marble counter as ice cream: coffee, chocolate, clam broth, beef bouillon and cups of soup. Condensed canned soup, commercialized in the United States in the late 1890s, was ideal for the trade because it required no stove, no stockpot and no skill beyond a hot-water tap, and it let a dispenser offer a hot lunch item without a kitchen. Bisque here carries the looser sense of a thick, cream-enriched puree rather than the strictly shellfish-based bisque of French practice, and tomato bisque was an early condensed variety. Instructions of this kind, aimed at the man behind the counter rather than a home cook, are why fountain manuals dwell on the china, the ladle and the covered container as much as on the soup itself.