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Tomato Soup
1 quart tomatoes, raw or canned 1 pint water 12 peppercorns Bit of bay leaf 4 cloves 2 teaspoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon soda 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 slice onion Cook tomatoes, water, seasonings, and sugar twenty minutes; strain, and add salt and soda. Brown butter and flour cooked together; bind, and strain into tureen.
A stockless tomato soup thickened with a browned roux — Farmer's simplest version, and one where the technique matters more than the shopping list.
- The hinge: brown the roux, then temper itCook the butter and flour together until browned, then whisk the hot strained tomato into it gradually rather than dumping the tomato onto the flour. "Bind" means thicken; the second straining, into the tureen, catches any lumps (the whole spices have already come out at the first strain).
- A quart of tomatoesAbout 2 lb of fresh ripe tomatoes, cut up with their juice, or one 28-oz can with liquid plus a splash of water to make a quart. Canned tomatoes of 1896 were plainer than today's — skip any that are seasoned or packed with basil.
- The sodaAn eighth of a teaspoon of baking soda neutralizes some of the tomato acid. The same pinch appears in cream-of-tomato recipes, where acid curdles the milk; there is no milk here, so it is arguably optional. Add it off the heat and expect a brief foam.
- Whole spicesTwelve peppercorns, four whole cloves and a fragment of bay leaf go in whole and are removed at the strainer. Ground cloves are not a substitute at this quantity — they will muddy the color and dominate.
- The onion"1 slice onion" means a single round cut from a peeled onion, added with the tomatoes at the start even though it is listed last.
- Heat and timeA steady simmer, not a boil, for the twenty minutes; the roux stage wants medium heat so the flour toasts without scorching. Total time is about half an hour.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. A quart of tomatoes and a pint of water go in; some volume is lost to reduction over the twenty minutes and to the solids left at the strainer.
This belongs to Fannie Farmer's chapter of "soups without stock" — the frugal end of the soup repertoire, meant for households that had no simmering stockpot and no time to build one. Canned tomatoes were cheap and widely available by 1896, which may be why the ingredient line offers "raw or canned" without preference. The browned butter-and-flour thickening gives body and a faintly toasted flavor in place of meat stock. The pinch of soda reflects a nineteenth-century conviction that tomato acid needed correcting, a belief that survived in cream of tomato recipes for decades and is often linked to the practical problem of milk curdling rather than to any question of taste.