Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Tomato Puree
Tomato Puree
Begin by cleaning four potatoes, two leeks, a celery, four carrots, three pounds of big tomatoes; well wash all these vegetables and cut them in dice, the tomatoes a little larger. Cook them all gently for an hour in nearly two pints of gravy, to which you have already added two thick slices of bread and a pinch of salt. Take care that your vegetables do not stick to the bottom of the pan. When all is well cooked, pass it through a fine tammy. Add more gravy, or water and meat juice; make it of the consistency that you wish. Bring it to the boil again over the fire, adding pepper and salt, and just before serving a bit of fresh butter also. It is a great improvement to add at the last minute the yolk of an egg, mixed in a little cold water, quickly stirred in when the soup is off the fire.
The three recipes for seven or eight persons.
A thickened vegetable soup rather than a sauce — the bread and potato do the work that cream or roux would do elsewhere. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms mean something other than what they look like.
- "Gravy" means stockIn British cookery writing of this period gravy is the strained meat broth, not the thickened pan sauce. Use about 2 pints (roughly 1 litre) of beef or veal stock; "meat juice" later in the recipe means the same thing, or the concentrated beef extracts sold at the time.
- "A celery"A whole head of celery, not one rib. Trim the base and the coarsest outer stalks and dice the rest, leaves included.
- The bread is the thickenerTwo thick slices, crusts and all, dissolve into the soup over the hour and give it body; the recipe does not specify the kind of loaf, and a plain white one is the safe assumption. Skip it and the puree will be thin.
- TammyA tammy is a fine woollen or linen straining cloth, worked with a wooden pestle or twisted between two people. A food mill or blender followed by a pass through a fine sieve gives the same smooth result; sieving matters because tomato skins and celery strings survive a blender.
- Watch the panThe warning about sticking is real — the potato and bread settle and scorch, and a scorched purée cannot be rescued. Use a heavy pan, a low flame, and stir down to the bottom every ten minutes.
- The egg liaisonSlacken the yolk with a spoonful of cold water, then temper it with a ladle of the hot soup before stirring it into the pan off the heat. Return it to a burner and it will curdle into threads. The same applies to the finishing butter — it should melt in, not boil.
- TomatoesThree pounds of ripe field tomatoes. Out of season, use good tinned whole tomatoes with their juice and cut the added stock back slightly.
- YieldThe original line reads "The three recipes for seven or eight persons", so the figure is given for a group of recipes rather than this soup alone; taken for this soup it holds as a first course in modest bowls, or about four as a main-course soup with bread.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck, who gathered recipes from Belgian refugees taken in by British households after the German invasion; the book is generally described as a relief-fund publication, and its tone throughout is one of introducing wartime hosts to what their guests actually ate at home. That context suits a soup like this one: it is frugal, using potato and bread rather than cream to build texture, and stretching a small quantity of meat stock across several bowls. The closing note that "the three recipes" serve seven or eight suggests this soup was printed as one of a group.