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Rice-and-Tomato Soup
Put one-half pound of well washed rice into a saucepan with two quarts of vegetable stock, and boil the whole until tender. When the rice is cooked, move the saucepan to the side of the fire, and mix in the contents of a can of tomatoes and one ounce of butter. Pour the soup into a tureen, and serve it with sippets of toast or croutons of bread that have been fried in butter.
A plain vegetarian soup of the sort a large hotel kitchen made from whatever stock was standing. It needs almost nothing but attention to seasoning and to the tomatoes going in off the heat.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups raw; two quarts of stock is 8 cups. The rice swells a good deal, so this yields roughly 8 to 10 servings of a thick soup. Thin with more stock if you want it looser.
- "A can of tomatoes"Canned tomatoes of the period came in several sizes, cans of roughly 20 ounces and larger being common, packed in their own juice without seasoning. A 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, is a reasonable match. Modern canned tomatoes are often salted and sometimes have added citric acid, so taste before adding salt.
- Add the tomatoes off the boil"Move the saucepan to the side of the fire" means pull it off direct heat to a gentle spot. Boiling the tomatoes hard after the rice is soft turns the grains to paste and dulls the acidity; warm them through for a few minutes only.
- Rice choiceUse a medium- or long-grain white rice. Modern rice is already clean, so the washing is about removing surface starch rather than dirt, and skipping it will make the soup noticeably gluier. Parboiled or converted rice holds its shape best if the soup is to be reheated.
- Vegetable stockA kitchen stock of this kind would have been the strained liquor from vegetable trimmings: carrot, onion, celery, leek, herbs, and likely lightly salted or not at all. Commercial vegetable broth is much saltier and often quite sweet; diluting it usually improves the result.
- SeasoningThe recipe names no salt or pepper at all; books written for professionals often left seasoning to the cook. It needs both, plus the ounce of butter (2 tablespoons) stirred in at the end for body.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toasted bread; the recipe offers them as an alternative to croutons of bread fried in butter, so it treats the two as distinct. If frying, clarified butter is less likely to scorch before the bread crisps.
- ReheatingThe rice keeps drinking liquid overnight and the soup will set almost solid in the refrigerator. Loosen with stock and reheat gently rather than adding water.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book was compiled from the working repertoire of the Waldorf, and its soup chapter reflects the era's habit of building dozens of variations on a few base liquids: here, vegetable stock plus a starch plus one dominant flavour. Rice-and-tomato combinations were cheap and meatless, in a hotel that fed a mixed clientele every day of the year. Canned tomatoes were by this point an ordinary commercial staple in American kitchens, and their unembarrassed appearance in a Waldorf recipe is a reminder that even the grandest hotel kitchens used tinned goods freely. The sippet was a word already old by 1896, and this recipe sets it alongside the word crouton.