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Cream of Tomato Soup
1/2 can tomatoes 2 teaspoons sugar ¼ teaspoon soda 1 quart milk 1 slice onion 4 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/3 cup butter Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and thicken milk with flour diluted with cold water until thin enough to pour, being careful that the mixture is free from lumps; cook twenty minutes, stirring constantly at first. Cook tomatoes with sugar fifteen minutes, add soda, and rub through a sieve; combine mixtures, and strain into tureen over butter, salt, and pepper.
Fannie Farmer's cream of tomato relies on a single trick: the soda neutralizes enough tomato acid that the milk will not curdle when the two are combined. Everything else is a thin white sauce.
- The hinge: combine off the heat, and quicklyEven with soda, hot acid meeting hot milk can break the soup. Have both mixtures hot but not boiling, combine them off the heat, and serve at once rather than holding it over heat.
- "14 teaspoon soda"A typographical loss of the fraction bar; the original reads 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. More than that gives a soapy, flat taste and can turn the soup a dull orange-brown.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied, so the quantity is approximate; read it as roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of canned tomatoes with their juice. A 14.5-oz can, used whole, is close enough.
- Flour diluted with cold waterThis is a slurry, not a roux. Whisk the 4 tablespoons flour with a few tablespoons of cold water until smooth, then stream it into the scalded milk while stirring; the butter goes in at the end, in the tureen.
- Twenty minutes on the milkThat length is for cooking out raw flour taste in a thin binding. Use a heavy pan or a double boiler and stir often, or the milk will scorch on the bottom and flavor the whole pot.
- Scalding with onionBring the milk just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, with the onion slice in it. It is an infusion, not a boil, and the onion is removed before thickening.
- The sugarTwo teaspoons across the tomato in this quantity is seasoning rather than sweetening. The recipe cooks it with the tomatoes, so judge the amount against the acidity of the tomatoes you have.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the tomato purée makes roughly six cups, serving four to six as a first course.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to a family of "soups without stock" that made a meatless first course possible in ordinary households, and its spread in America is closely tied to the canned tomato, which by the 1890s was cheap, reliable, and available year-round. Farmer's method — a milk thickened with flour, a tomato purée sweetened and neutralized with soda, the two joined at the last moment — is often described as a typical cooking-school answer to the curdling problem, and it is said to have been taught alongside white sauce as a lesson in what acid does to milk. A condensed tomato soup followed not long after, and the soup became so familiar in that guise that the homemade version is now usually met second. The tureen, the strained finish, and the butter melted in at the table suggest a formal service recipe rather than a supper-pot one.