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Mock Bisque Soup
1 cup stewed toma- 2 cups scalded milk toes, strained teaspoonful soda 1 teaspoonful sugar
The text as printed is a truncated ingredient column — the method has been lost in the original setting — but this is the standard cream of tomato of the period, and the proportions are legible enough to work from.
- The hinge is the sodaThe pinch of baking soda neutralises enough of the tomato's acid to keep the milk from curdling when the two meet. Without it the soup breaks into curds and whey almost immediately.
- Even so, combine at the last momentScald the milk, strain the hot tomato, stir the soda into the tomato, then pour the tomato into the milk off the heat and serve at once. Holding the combined soup over heat risks curdling it even with the soda.
- The soda quantity is ambiguousThe line reads "teaspoonful soda" with no fraction, and a full teaspoon in two cups of milk would taste soapy and metallic. Recipes of this type generally call for a fraction of a teaspoon, an eighth to a quarter being usual; err low and add more only if the milk shows signs of separating.
- "Scalded milk"Heated to just below the boil, around 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. With modern pasteurised milk this is a temperature step only, not the sterilising step it once was.
- Stewed tomatoesIn a left-overs book this means yesterday's cooked tomatoes, pressed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. A cup of canned crushed tomato, simmered a few minutes and strained, stands in exactly.
- No thickening is givenThe result is a thin soup. If you want the body a bisque implies, scald the milk with a roux of a tablespoon each of butter and flour before adding the tomato.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are not listed and are needed; the teaspoon of sugar is there to round the tomato's acid, not to sweeten.
- YieldThree cups of liquid — two small first-course servings, or one supper bowl.
A bisque is often said to have been a shellfish soup, thickened with pounded crustacean shells and enriched with cream, though the earliest French bisques were game-bird soups and the shellfish sense appears to be later; the word carried enough prestige in late nineteenth-century American cooking that tomato soup made with milk borrowed it outright. "Mock" here works the same way it does in mock turtle: the dish claims a luxury it does not contain. The baking-soda trick appears in cookery school texts of the period as a matter of course. A cup of yesterday's stewed tomatoes and a little milk was among the cheapest ways to get a hot first course onto the table, and the strainer did the work of disguising the leftover's origins.