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Tomato Cream Soup
Peel and slice one quart of fresh, ripe tomatoes, pick carefully over one-half breakfast cupful of rice, and wash it well in cold water; rub two tablespoonfuls of butter to a smooth paste with one tablespoonful of flour; put the tomatoes over the fire in a soup kettle, with one quart of cold water, and let them heat gradually. When they are thoroughly heated add one more quart of cold water, and when this boils, put in the rice, one saltspoonful of pepper, and two teaspoonfuls of salt, and continue the boiling until the rice is tender, but not broken; then stir in the paste of flour and butter, one saltspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, and one pint of milk, or sufficient to make the soup as thick as cream. Allow the soup to boil for a few minutes to thoroughly cook the flour, and then serve without delay in a tureen.
A plain cream-of-tomato thickened as much by rice as by flour. The one thing to watch is the finish: the milk goes in at the end, and the soup should not sit or boil hard once it does.
- The hinge: adding the milkAcid tomato plus milk curdles readily. Add the milk off a hard boil, stir it in steadily, and bring the soup back only to a bare simmer for the few minutes needed to cook out the flour.
- Why the soda is thereThe saltspoonful of bicarbonate neutralises some of the tomato acid so the milk stays smooth. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; do not increase it, as excess soda flattens the tomato flavour and leaves a soapy edge.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup runs 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so half of one is roughly half a cup of raw rice — a substantial amount that will thicken the pot considerably as it cooks.
- A quart of tomatoesMeasured as peeled slices, about 2 lb of ripe tomatoes. Out of season, 2 lb of canned whole tomatoes with their juice gives a better result than pale fresh ones.
- Picking over the riceAn instruction from an era when rice arrived with stones and hulls in it. Modern packaged rice needs only a rinse, or nothing at all.
- Rice tender but not brokenLong-grain rice needs 15 to 18 minutes in the simmering tomato liquid. Cooked past that it bursts and turns the soup pasty rather than creamy.
- The butter-flour pasteThis is a beurre manié, worked cold and smooth, whisked in a little at a time so it disperses rather than lumping.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of water and a pint of milk, plus the quart of tomatoes and the rice, comes to roughly 3 quarts, to be served at once, as the rice keeps drinking liquid and the soup stiffens as it stands.
Tomato soup thickened with rice belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American repertoire, when tomatoes had shed their old reputation as suspect nightshades and become one of the most reliably available vegetables, fresh in summer and canned the rest of the year. The bicarbonate trick appears in household manuals of the period as a way of keeping milk from curdling against something acid, and it predates the commercial condensed tomato soups that eventually made the technique unnecessary for most people. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel and the compiler whose name the 1896 book carries, gathered a great many such straightforward domestic formulas alongside the hotel's elaborate ones — this is a soup for a family table rather than a banquet, and it reads like it.