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Corn and Tomato Soup
Cut two pounds of beef into small pieces, put it into a saucepan with three quarts of water, and boil gently at one side of the fire for two hours. Skim the liquor, put in several large tomatoes, and boil them for an hour. When cooked, drain and pass the tomatoes through a fine sieve, and return them to the soup. Boil a few ears of corn in salted water; when cooked, free the corn from the cob and put it in the soup; also put in a small lump of butter and season to taste with salt and pepper. Boil the soup again, pour it into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
A plain beef broth built from scratch, then finished with two summer vegetables. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the boiling times both need translating.
- "Boil gently at one side of the fire"On a coal range the side of the firebox was the cool zone. On a modern hob this means a bare simmer with the surface just trembling, uncovered or barely covered, for two hours. A rolling boil will emulsify the fat and leave the broth cloudy and greasy.
- The beefTwo pounds of "beef cut into small pieces" for three quarts of water means stewing meat with connective tissue and preferably a bone or two: shin, chuck or short rib. Lean cuts will give you very little. Expect to skim foam in the first twenty minutes as well as at the point the recipe specifies.
- Tomatoes"Several large tomatoes" is roughly 2 lb of ripe field tomatoes. An hour of boiling is a period habit rather than a necessity; 20 to 30 minutes is enough to collapse them for sieving, and the shorter time keeps the flavour brighter. Out of season, a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes is a fair substitute.
- Passing through a sieveThe point is to remove skin and seeds while keeping the pulp. Press hard with a ladle or use a food mill on the medium plate. A blender will not do the same job, since it purées the skins straight back into the soup.
- The corn"A few ears" is three or four, giving roughly two to three cups of kernels. Cook them only until the kernels turn a shade deeper, five minutes at most; modern sweet corn varieties go starchy with long boiling.
- Final boilBring back only to a simmer to melt the butter and marry the flavours. Hard boiling at this stage toughens the corn and does nothing for the broth.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted dry, handed separately so they stay crisp; the recipe offers fried bread croutons as the alternative.
- YieldThree quarts of water reduces to roughly two after the long simmer; with the vegetables added, expect six to eight first-course servings.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf; the Cook Book of 1896 that bears his name is a compendium of the hotel's working repertoire rather than a personal manifesto. This soup shows the American side of that repertoire: a French-style beef broth used as a vehicle for sweet corn and tomatoes, two ingredients that carried little weight in the grand European kitchens the Waldorf was imitating. Corn was often regarded in Europe as animal feed, and its appearance in a hotel soup tureen alongside sippets of toast suggests how New York cooking at the end of the century took a French frame and filled it with local produce. The soup is seasonal in character, belonging to late summer when both corn and tomatoes were at their best.