Creole Soup
1 quart Brown Soup Stock 1 pint tomatoes 3 tablespoons chopped green peppers 2 tablespoons chopped onion ¼ cup butter 1/3 cup flour
An ingredient list in the Fannie Farmer shorthand style, where the method for a thickened vegetable soup was assumed knowledge. Everything here hinges on the butter-and-flour roux, which is the only reason the quantities of fat and flour are so high relative to the liquid.
- The butter measureThe printed figure for butter reads as "14 cup," which is not a quantity the book uses. Against 1/3 cup flour, the intended amount is most likely 1/4 cup, close enough to the flour to make a workable roux.
- Brown soup stockIn this book that means beef, shin and bones, with part of the meat browned in fat before simmering, giving a dark, gelatinous stock. A good commercial beef stock works; add a spoonful of tomato paste and a little browned onion if it tastes pale.
- A pint of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period were generally packed whole in their own juice, though some brands added salt. Use a 14-15 oz can, juice included, broken up with a spoon. Fresh tomatoes need peeling and a longer cooking to lose their rawness.
- The roux is the whole dishMelt the butter, sweat the onion and pepper in it until soft but not coloured, stir in the flour and cook it two or three minutes so it loses its pasty taste, then add stock and tomatoes gradually while whisking. Dumping cold liquid in all at once gives lumps that no amount of simmering will smooth.
- Green peppersStandard bell peppers. Three tablespoons chopped is about a quarter of a small pepper -- modest by modern taste, and worth doubling if you want the flavour to read clearly.
- StrainingPuree-style soups of this era were often pressed through a sieve, which removes tomato skins and seeds and gives a velvety body; nothing in the list as printed calls for it, so treat it as optional. A stick blender is the modern shortcut, though the texture stays coarser.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper appears in the list as printed; seasoning may have been left to the stock or to the method text. Taste at the end; canned tomatoes and packaged stock vary enormously in salt.
- YieldA quart of stock plus a pint of tomatoes makes about six cups, or four to six first-course servings.
"Creole" on an American menu around 1900 often meant less a recipe from a Louisiana kitchen than a shorthand for tomatoes, onion and green pepper cooked together, the trio that Northern cookbook writers had learned to associate with New Orleans cooking. Fannie Farmer's book carries several such dishes, all built on the same base and none of them requiring anything a Boston grocer could not supply. The reliance on canned tomatoes is itself a marker of the period: commercial canning is generally credited with making tomatoes widely available outside the growing season by the end of the nineteenth century, which is what allowed a "Creole" flavour to become a standing option in a New England household rather than a summer novelty.