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Iced Tomato Bouillon
2 cups beef or veal stock
1/8 teaspoon paprika
2 cups tomato juice
Salt to taste
Whipped cream
Combine the boiling tomato juice with the boiling soup stock; season; cool. Serve cold in bouillon cups with one teaspoon of whipped cream in each cup.
A four-ingredient chilled soup that lives or dies on the stock. The instruction to boil both liquids separately before combining is the only real technique here, and it is worth keeping.
- Why boil firstBoth liquids are brought to a boil separately and then combined. Boiling the tomato juice on its own may cook off some of its raw note, but the recipe gives no reason for the step.
- The stockHomemade beef or veal stock is meant, and it matters more than usual because nothing masks it once the soup is cold. A good low-sodium boxed beef broth works; bouillon cubes will read as salt and little else.
- Tomato juiceJuice at this date might be canned, bottled, or strained at home. Look for a plain, unseasoned juice rather than a spiced or cocktail-style one, which will fight the paprika.
- Season cold, not hotThe recipe seasons the soup while hot and then cools it. Because chilling flattens salt and acid, it is worth tasting and correcting again once the soup is fully cold.
- PaprikaAn eighth of a teaspoon in four cups is a background warmth, not a flavor. Use sweet Hungarian paprika; smoked paprika was not a common item in American pantries at the time and will dominate.
- ChillingFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Serve genuinely cold — this is a hot-weather first course and lukewarm tomato broth is unpleasant.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, whipped only to soft peaks, spooned on at the moment of serving. Stiff cream sits on the surface like a lid; soft cream slumps and streaks into the broth as it is eaten, which is the point.
- Yield and vesselFour cups of liquid, so four to six servings. A bouillon cup holds about 5 to 6 ounces — small handled cups or teacups do the job; a full soup bowl makes the portion look thin.
Chilled clear soups were a fixture of American summer entertaining from the 1890s through the 1930s, when a menu often opened with something in a two-handled bouillon cup. Tomato bouillon in particular rode the rise of commercially canned tomato juice, which became widely available toward the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s and made a bright red broth available to households that would once have had to stew and strain fresh tomatoes. The Book of a Thousand Menus is best described as a planning book rather than a cookbook proper, though it does contain recipes, and those recipes appear because a menu somewhere in its pages calls for them: this is the kind of first course that could be made the day before, needed no last-minute stove work, and signaled a certain formality with almost no labor. The spoonful of whipped cream is a finish often given to tomato soup in this period, hot or cold — the same instinct that produced cream of tomato soup, applied to a clear broth.