Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Tomato Bisque
Tomato Bisque
Stew half a can of tomatoes until they become quite soft and will strain readily, then boil a quart of milk in a double boiler. Cook together a tablespoonful of cornstarch and an equal quantity of butter in a small saucepan, adding enough hot milk to make it pour readily, then stir it carefully into the boiling milk, and let it boil for about ten minutes; then add a third of a cup of butter in small lumps, and stir it until it has become well incorporated, add some salt and pepper and the strained tomatoes, and if the tomatoes are very acid, half a saltspoonful of soda may be added. Serve while hot.
A late-Victorian cream soup built on a cornstarch-thickened milk rather than stock. It comes together in twenty minutes, and almost everything that can go wrong happens in the last thirty seconds.
- The hinge: adding the tomatoesAcid meets hot milk and the milk curdles. Have the tomatoes hot, the milk off the boil, and pour the tomatoes into the milk (not the reverse) while stirring steadily, then serve at once. The soup will not sit happily on a low burner.
- The sodaA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon; half of that is an eighth. Baking soda neutralises some of the tomato acid and is genuine insurance against curdling, but more than a pinch flattens the tomato flavour and leaves a soapy edge. Add it to the tomatoes, not the milk, and expect it to foam.
- Half a can of tomatoesCans of the period were commonly around a quart. Half is about 2 cups of tomatoes with their juice, which will reduce and strain down to something like a cup of pur/e against the quart of milk.
- Straining"Strain readily" means pushing the stewed tomatoes through a fine sieve to leave skins and seeds behind. A blender plus a sieve is faster; skipping the sieve gives a rougher soup than the name bisque implies.
- The butterA tablespoon goes into the cornstarch paste and a further third of a cup is beaten in at the end, off the direct heat, for gloss and body. That is a great deal of butter by current standards and can be halved without harming the texture.
- Cornstarch, not flourCornstarch cooked with butter is a white sauce in miniature. Slacken it with hot milk to a pourable cream before it goes into the pot, or it will seize into lumps that no whisking recovers. Ten minutes of gentle boiling cooks out the starchy taste.
- Double boilerUsed here because milk scorches on direct heat. A heavy-bottomed pan over low heat works if you stir; a thin pan does not.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the tomatoes gives about five cups, or four to six first-course servings.
Bisque is generally traced to a rich soup of game birds and crayfish, with the shellfish-only sense coming later, and the transfer of the word to a smooth, milk-based tomato pur ineteenth century, helped along by the arrival of reliable canned tomatoes. Oscar Tschirky, who was never a cook but ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this collection, records the soup.