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Tomato Soup
Put one quart of tomatoes into a saucepan with one pint of hot water, and bring it to the boil. Rub together two heaping tablespoonfuls of flour and one tablespoonful of butter; stir this into the boiling mixture, and season. Boil for fifteen minutes in all, and pass it through a fine sieve. Cut off some thin slices of bread, without their crusts, butter them, cut them into dice and plac hem in a pan with their buttered sides up, and brown them in a quick oven. Serve the bread and soup separately.
A plain flour-thickened tomato purée of the sort that anchored hotel luncheon menus around 1900. The method is sound; only the measures and the oven need translating.
- The tomatoesOne quart means canned or home-put-up tomatoes with their juice, roughly two 14-15 oz tins. Fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped, will work but give a thinner, sharper soup unless they are very ripe.
- Beurre manié, not rouxFlour and butter rubbed cold and stirred into boiling liquid is a beurre manié. Work it to a smooth paste with no dry specks and add it in small pieces, whisking, or the soup will be lumpy before it ever reaches the sieve.
- Fifteen minutes "in all"The total simmer, counted from the first boil, not fifteen minutes after thickening. That is enough to cook out the raw flour taste; longer only dulls the tomato.
- SeasonOscar leaves this blank. Salt and white pepper are the obvious reading, and some period tomato soups add a pinch of sugar against the acidity, though nothing here specifies it. Note that the recipe seasons at the boil, not after sieving.
- Passing it through a sieveA fine sieve pushed with a ladle removes skins and seeds and is what gives the soup its texture. A blender alone leaves the seeds in, broken up, which some find faintly bitter.
- A quick oven425-450F. The croutons take five to eight minutes at that heat; watch them, as buttered bread goes from gold to black quickly.
- Serving separatelyThe croutons come to table in their own dish so they stay crisp. Yield is somewhat over a quart of finished soup, after boiling and sieving; four small first-course servings.
- A note on curdlingIf you are tempted to add cream, take the soup off the heat first; tomato acid can split dairy, though the flour in this soup gives some protection.
Oscar Tschirky was not a cook but the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book collected the working formulas of the hotel's kitchens alongside a good deal of general American household cookery. This tomato soup belongs to the second category: it is the standard flour-bound puree found in many period manuals. Canned tomatoes were by the 1890s among the cheaper and more reliable tinned goods in the United States, which helped make tomato soup a year-round rather than a late-summer dish. The croutons served apart are the hotel touch — the same instinct for keeping crisp things crisp as in the Waldorf salad, which appears in this same book.