Home › Soups Without Stock › Mock Bisque Soup
Mock Bisque Soup
2 cups raw or canned tomatoes Bit of bay leaf 2 teaspoons sugar 1/3 teaspoon soda 1½ onion, stuck with 6 cloves Sprig of parsley ¾ cup stale bread crumbs 4 cups milk ½ tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/3 cup butter Scald milk with bread crumbs, onion, parsley, and bay leaf. Remove seasonings and rub through a sieve. Cook tomatoes with sugar fifteen minutes; add soda and rub through a sieve. Reheat bread and milk to boiling-point, add tomatoes, and pour at once into tureen over butter, salt, and pepper. Serve with croûtons, crisp crackers, or souffléd crackers.
A tomato cream soup built without stock, thickened by bread crumbs rather than roux. The whole recipe turns on keeping the acid and the dairy apart until the last possible second.
- The hinge: curdlingTomato acid can curdle scalded milk, and the risk rises if either is off the boil or if the two are held together. Bring both to boiling point separately and combine them in the tureen at the moment of serving, exactly as written; do not let the mixed soup sit on the heat.
- What the soda doesThe pinch of baking soda neutralises part of the tomato acid so the milk stands a better chance. Use no more than the recipe says and expect it to foam up when it hits the hot tomato: a heavy hand gives a soapy, flat taste.
- Bread crumbs as thickenerStale, dry crumbs from a plain white loaf, not fresh soft crumb and not seasoned packaged crumbs. They swell in the scalded milk and are then pushed through a sieve, which is what gives the soup its body. A blender does the same work faster, though a sieve afterwards still catches the skins.
- Onion stuck with clovesA peeled onion studded with whole cloves is an infusing device, not an ingredient to eat. It goes into the milk, flavours it, and comes out again with the parsley and bay before sieving.
- ScaldingScalded milk means heated to about 180F, just until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge of the pan. Do this over low heat or in a double boiler; bread crumbs scorch readily on a direct flame.
- TomatoesTwo cups of canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice works directly. With fresh tomatoes you want ripe ones, roughly a pound, and the fifteen-minute cook is there to break them down before sieving.
- The salt figureRead the salt as teaspoons rather than tablespoons. A tablespoon and a half in six cups of soup would be inedible. Season at the tureen and taste.
- Yield and serviceSix cups of liquid gives four to six servings. Souffled crackers are a period cracker preparation baked in a hot oven until puffed and browned; croutons or plain crisp crackers serve the same purpose.
Mock bisque earns its name by imitating the texture of a shellfish bisque -- a soup enriched with cream and thickened with the pounded flesh and shells of lobster or crab -- using nothing but tomatoes, milk and stale bread. Fannie Farmer placed it among the soups without stock, a section useful to households with no stockpot going, and the chapter reflects what a turn-of-the-century American kitchen leaned on: canned tomatoes, widely available and inexpensive by the end of the nineteenth century, and yesterday's bread. The baking-soda trick for taming tomato acid in a milk soup appears commonly in the period's cookbooks and domestic-science manuals, though later writers grew wary of it for the dulling effect it has on tomato flavour.