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Pepper (Cup each cut in dice Cook)
} ¼ cup each cut in dice Cook onion, carrot, celery, and ham in butter five minutes, add flour, peppercorns, bay leaf, cloves, and thyme, and cook three minutes; then add tomatoes, cover, and cook slowly one hour. When cooked in oven it requires less watching. Rub through a strainer, add hot stock, and season with salt and pepper.
The page has come down to us with its ingredient list truncated -- only the tail of it survives ("1/4 cup each cut in dice"), so quantities for the butter, flour, tomatoes and stock are missing. The method is complete and workable, and it is the standard Boston Cooking-School formula for a strained tomato purée soup built on a diced vegetable-and-ham base.
- What is missingThe surviving text gives 1/4 cup each of diced onion, carrot, celery and ham. Amounts for butter, flour, tomatoes and stock are lost with the top of the list; do not guess at a fixed conversion.
- The hingeCook the flour with the vegetables and whole spices for the full three minutes before the tomatoes go in, as the recipe directs; a roux cooked out first is generally held to thicken more cleanly than raw flour added to acid tomato.
- Whole spices, not groundPeppercorns, bay, cloves and thyme are meant to be strained out. Ground substitutes will pass through the sieve and turn the soup gritty and harsh.
- "Cook slowly one hour"A bare simmer on the stovetop, lid on, stirring occasionally so the flour does not catch. The recipe offers an oven alternative but gives no temperature; a low covered oven answers the description that it "requires less watching."
- "Rub through a strainer"A fine sieve and a wooden spoon or ladle was the period tool. A food mill does the same job faster; a blender does not substitute, as it purées the peppercorns and clove rather than removing them.
- TomatoesThe recipe does not specify fresh or canned, and gives no quantity. Fresh tomatoes need peeling and will give a thinner result unless you reduce longer.
- Salt lastThe diced ham and the stock both carry salt, and an hour of covered cooking concentrates it. Season only after the hot stock is stirred in.
- ServingThe recipe specifies hot stock: it should be added hot to hot, since cold stock dropped into the purée cools it and leaves the flour taste forward. No yield can be given, as the quantities are lost.
The diced onion, carrot and celery cooked in butter with a piece of ham is a mirepoix, the aromatic foundation of French sauce and soup cookery. What marks the recipe as American and late-nineteenth-century is the tomato: canned tomatoes had become cheap and reliable by the 1890s, and cookbooks of the period lean on them heavily for soups that would otherwise have needed long-simmered fresh vegetables. The instruction that the soup "requires less watching" in the oven is probably a coal-range habit -- an oven of that kind is often said to have held steady heat for hours whether you wanted it or not, so cooks may well have parked slow work there and freed the stovetop. The strainer step, tedious with the equipment of the day, was not optional: a soup served at table was, one presumes, meant to be smooth, and the whole spices had to come out.