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Cream of Tomato Soup
1 Quart Fresh or Canned Tomatoes Pinch of Soda 3 Tablespoons Butter 1 Quart Milk 3 Tablespoons Cornstarch Salt and Pepper to Taste Make a sauce of the butter, cornstarch and milk, and season well. Heat the tomatoes and strain, adding a bit of soda. When both sauce and tomatoes are very hot, pour the tomatoes into the white sauce and serve quickly. Serve with croutons.
A straightforward white-sauce tomato soup of the kind that filled early twentieth-century American cookbooks. The whole recipe turns on one moment: combining the two hot liquids without curdling.
- The hinge: pour tomato into milkThe direction to pour the tomatoes into the white sauce is not arbitrary. Adding hot acidic purée gradually to a thickened dairy base lets the starch protect the milk proteins; doing it the other way round, or letting the mixture stand or boil after joining, gives you a grainy, separated soup.
- The pinch of sodaBaking soda neutralises some of the tomato acid, which is the period's insurance against curdling. Use no more than about 1/8 teaspoon per quart — too much tastes soapy and flattens the tomato flavour, and a well-made cornstarch sauce plus a fast service does most of the work anyway.
- Serve quickly means serve quicklyThis soup does not hold. Have the bowls warmed and the croutons ready before you combine, and take it off the heat the moment it is together.
- Making the sauceSlake the cornstarch in a little cold milk first, melt the butter, add the remaining milk, then whisk in the slurry and cook over medium heat until it just thickens and loses any raw-starch taste — two to three minutes at a bare simmer. Three tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart of milk makes a thick sauce on its own, though once the quart of tomato is stirred in the finished soup is only moderately thickened; two tablespoons is closer to modern taste.
- Straining the tomatoes"Heat the tomatoes and strain" means pushing them through a sieve to remove skin and seeds. A food mill does it fastest; a blender followed by a sieve also works. A quart of canned tomatoes is roughly two 14-15 oz cans with their juice.
- Seasoning"Season well" in the milk sauce is the only seasoning step given. Salt the sauce assertively, since the tomato purée arrives unsalted, and taste once combined — a pinch of sugar helps if the tomatoes are sharp.
- YieldTwo quarts finished, so four generous or six modest servings.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to the era when the French white sauce — butter, starch, milk — had become a staple of American home cooking, taught in cooking schools and reproduced in many community and bridal cookbooks of the period. Cornstarch here rather than flour reflects the wide availability of boxed cornstarch, which by the late nineteenth century was cheap, kept well, and was promoted for exactly this sort of smooth, pale sauce. The pinch of soda suggests that curdling was a familiar failure in kitchens where milk was raw and variable. It is inexpensive, uses canned tomatoes as readily as fresh, and produces something that reads as a course rather than a supper — the kind of dish a new household could put in front of guests.