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Tomato Bouillon with Oysters
1 can tomatoes ½ quarts bouillon 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1½ bay leaf 6 cloves ½ teaspoon celery seed ½ teaspoon peppercorns 1 pint oysters Mix all ingredients except oysters, and boil twenty minutes. Strain, cool, and clear. Add parboiled oysters, and serve in bouillon cups with small croûtons.
A clear consommé-style soup that depends almost entirely on the clarifying step and on not overcooking the oysters. Two lines of the original carry all the technique.
- "Clear" is a step, not an adjectiveFannie Farmer means clarifying: whisk 1-2 egg whites (with the crushed shells, as the book elsewhere directs) into the cold strained soup, bring it slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, let the raft form and hold for about 15 minutes, then ladle carefully through cheesecloth. If you skip this you get a cloudy tomato broth rather than a bouillon.
- The oystersParboil means dropping them into their own liquor or simmering broth only until the edges ruffle, roughly 1 minute. Fifteen or twenty minutes of cooking, which some older soups call for, turns them to rubber. Add them to the hot cleared bouillon at the last moment.
- A can of tomatoes"1 can" is not a fixed measure. Commercial cans of this period ran from about a pint to about a quart, and around 2½ cups with juice is the usual reading for this book. A modern 28 oz can is the safer substitution; adjust to taste.
- BouillonClear brown stock made from lean beef, not a cube. A good unsalted beef broth works; taste and salt only after clarifying, since the tomato reduces and concentrates.
- StrainingPass the boiled mixture through a fine sieve first to catch the cloves, peppercorns and tomato seeds, then cool it completely before clarifying. Egg white added to hot liquid sets in threads instead of forming a raft.
- YieldRoughly two quarts before clarifying, depending on the size of the can; six to eight bouillon cups. Croûtons are small dice of bread fried or toasted dry, added at the last moment so they do not soften.
Bouillon in an American cookbook of this era meant a clear, lightly seasoned beef broth served in two-handled cups, often as the opening course at a dinner or as refreshment at afternoon receptions, where a cup could be held standing. The Boston Cooking-School book carries a run of these — plain bouillon, tomato bouillon, tomato bouillon with oysters — from a period when clarity in a soup was read as a mark of skill and the clarification raft was taught as a basic technique. Canned tomatoes, cheap and widely available by the 1890s, gave a cook colour and acidity out of season, and oysters were then abundant and comparatively inexpensive, sold by the quart and shucked into their liquor. The pairing of tomato and oyster appears in nineteenth-century American cookery in pan roasts and stews as well.