Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Tomato Soup
Tomato Soup
Boil together six medium potatoes, a celery, two leeks, two carrots, and a pound of fresh tomatoes, with pepper, salt and a leaf of bay. Pass all through the sieve. Fry two or three chopped onions in some butter and add the soup to them. Boil up again for twenty minutes before serving. If you have no fresh tomatoes, the tinned ones can be used, removing the skin, at the same time that you add the fried onions.
Soup, Cream of Asparagus Boil some potatoes and pass them through the sieve, add the asparagus-tops, with a pat of butter for each four tops; thin the soup with extract of meat and water, and at the last moment stir in the raw yolks of two eggs, and a little chopped parsley.
Two soups run together in one paragraph: a puréed vegetable soup thickened with potato, and a quick asparagus cream. Neither gives a liquid quantity, which is the main thing to settle before you start.
- The missing waterNo liquid is specified for the tomato soup. Cover the vegetables by about an inch — roughly 6 to 7 cups for this quantity — and thin at the end to the consistency you want. The potatoes are the thickener, so the soup will tighten as it stands.
- "A celery" means the headIn British usage of this period a celery generally means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Use most of a head, tough outer ribs and all, since everything is sieved.
- Sieve or blenderPassing through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth purée in 1915. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds, though a food mill still gives the cleanest result with tomato skins and celery fibre.
- Order of operationsThe onions are fried separately and the soup poured onto them, then boiled twenty minutes. That second boil is what marries the raw-tasting onion into the purée; do not shorten it to five minutes.
- Tinned tomatoesModern tinned tomatoes are peeled already, so the instruction to remove the skin is obsolete. A 14 oz tin stands in for the pound of fresh; add it with the onions as directed, since it needs less cooking than fresh fruit.
- Extract of meatThis means Liebig's extract or Bovril — a dark, salty meat concentrate dissolved in hot water. A good chicken or beef stock is the closest substitute; if you use a bouillon concentrate, taste before adding salt.
- Asparagus tops and butterA pat is an unfixed measure, somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, so four tops get roughly that much butter. "Tops" means the tender tips only; the stalks can go in with the potatoes and be sieved out.
- The raw yolksTwo yolks stirred in off the heat will thicken the soup but never reach a pasteurising temperature. Temper them with a ladle of hot soup first to avoid curdling, and use pasteurised eggs if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- YieldThe tomato soup should make roughly six servings, though with no liquid quantity given this is an estimate. The asparagus soup gives no quantities at all — not even the number of potatoes — so any yield for it is a guess.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it was published in aid of Belgian relief — a cookbook as fundraising and as a record of a displaced cuisine. That origin may help explain the character of these two soups: no quantities of liquid, no timings for the asparagus, no yields. It also explains the frugality. A soup built on six potatoes, a head of celery, leeks and carrots, with a single pound of tomatoes for colour and acidity, is a kitchen-garden dish, and the note about tinned tomatoes is a small marker of how far commercial canning had already reached the ordinary household by the first years of the First World War.