Home › Soups › Meatless Tomato Soup
Meatless Tomato Soup
One quart tomatoes, one of water; stew till soft; add tea-spoon soda, allow to effervesce, and add quart of boiling milk, salt, butter, and pepper to taste, with a little rolled cracker; boil a few minutes and serve. - Mrs. D. C. Conkey,
A late-nineteenth-century cream of tomato, built on the old trick of neutralizing the tomatoes with soda so the milk will not curdle. The whole recipe hinges on that step and on the order in which the two liquids meet.
- The soda is the hingeA teaspoon of baking soda in a quart of stewed tomatoes will foam up hard, so use a pot at least twice the volume you think you need and stir off the heat. Its job is to cut the acid enough that the hot milk will not break; a scant teaspoon is plenty, and too much leaves a flat, slightly soapy taste.
- Curdling insuranceThe recipe adds the boiling milk to the tomato; some cooks prefer the reverse, adding the tomato to the hot milk, and keeping the pot below a hard boil. A light roux or a little flour cooked in the butter is another way to stabilize it.
- A quart of tomatoesOften this means put-up tomatoes, skins and juice together, roughly two 14-15 oz cans with their liquid, though fresh tomatoes in season would also have been meant. Fresh work if peeled and seeded, but they carry more water, so the extra quart of water can be cut back.
- Rolled crackerSoda crackers crushed fine with a rolling pin, used as the thickener. Start with about a quarter cup and add more once it has had two or three minutes to swell, since it goes on absorbing after it looks right.
- Butter and saltNo quantities are given, as is common in recipes of this kind. Two tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt for a batch this size is a reasonable starting point; taste at the end.
- Cooking time"Stew till soft" means about 15 minutes for canned tomatoes, longer for fresh. After the milk goes in, a few minutes is genuinely all it wants -- prolonged boiling with cracker crumbs turns the soup pasty.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three quarts, serving eight or so. It thickens noticeably on standing and on reheating, so thin with milk if held.
The word "meatless" in the title is doing real work: meat stock was common enough in soups of the period that a soup needing none was worth flagging for Fridays, Lent, hot weather, and thin weeks. Tomato soup with milk became a household staple in America in the second half of the nineteenth century, once home canning had made tomatoes a year-round vegetable, and the soda-to-prevent-curdling trick appears in cookbook after cookbook of the period -- an ordinary piece of kitchen chemistry passed along long before anyone in a home kitchen was talking about pH. The Dixie Cook Book, like its Midwestern cousins in the Buckeye family of compiled cookbooks, often credits a receipt to the woman who contributed it, which is why Mrs. D. C. Conkey's name sits at the bottom rather than a page reference.