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Paprika (Tablespoonfuls butter)
1 cup stewed tomatoes, strained. 1/8 teaspoonful soda. 1 teaspoonful sugar. 2 cups scalded milk. 2 tablespoonfuls butter 2 tablespoonfuls flour ½ teaspoonful salt Heat the tomatoes and add soda. Cook butter and flour together, add seasoning, and pour in gradually the hot tomato. Let this boil up. Take from intense heat, and when below the boilingpoint add the hot milk slowly, stirring constantly. Season more highly if desired. After the addition of the milk the soup should be kept hot, but must I22 not boil.
This is a cream of tomato soup, and the page has come down to us with its ingredient list truncated — the butter, flour and salt survive, but the quantities of tomato, soda and milk have been lost along with the stray running head that gave it the title "Paprika." The method is complete enough to follow, and it is the method that matters here.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the milkAcid from the tomato will curdle milk on contact with high heat, which is why the recipe insists the mixture drop below boiling before the milk goes in and stay off the boil afterward. Hold it at a bare steam, around 180F, and serve promptly.
- The missing quantitiesFor the 2 tablespoons butter and flour given, a working ratio is about 2 cups strained tomato (a 14–15 oz can, or leftover stewed tomatoes pushed through a sieve) and 2 cups milk. The original gives no figure, so this is an inference from the roux, not a recovered measurement.
- SodaA pinch — no more than 1/8 teaspoon per 2 cups of tomato — neutralizes enough acid to help the milk behave. Too much tastes soapy and flattens the tomato entirely. Modern practice generally skips it and relies on temperature control instead.
- "Intense heat"Read it as high heat on a modern gas or induction burner, and "take from" it as moving to a low burner or off the heat altogether; on a coal or wood range the equivalent would have been the hottest part of the top.
- Cook the roux properlyButter and flour together for two to three minutes over medium heat, until it smells faintly nutty, before any liquid goes in. Adding the tomato to raw flour leaves a pasty taste that no amount of seasoning will cover.
- Add the tomato hotThe instruction to heat the tomato first is not decorative — hot liquid into a hot roux thickens smoothly without lumps, which is the same logic behind heating milk for a béchamel.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt is modest for four cups of liquid; the "season more highly if desired" invites black pepper and, given the page heading, paprika. A pinch of sugar balances tinned tomato that reads sharp.
- YieldAbout four cups, serving four as a first course or two as a light supper.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to a family of dishes that became practical on a domestic scale once canned tomatoes were cheap and reliable, which in American kitchens meant roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The soup was a convenient way to use up stewed tomatoes from an earlier meal, thickened with the butter-and-flour paste standard in period cookery. Soda as insurance against curdling was printed in household manuals of the era, and the repetition of "must not boil" suggests how often it failed. The odd title here appears to be an artifact of the printed page rather than the dish -- a fragment of the surrounding text, along with the stray page number "122" that survives mid-sentence in the original scan.