Tomato Soup
Skim and strain one gallon of stock made from nice fresh beef; take three quarts tomatoes, remove skin and cut out hard center, put through a fine sieve, and add to the stock; make a paste of butter and flour, and, when the stock begins to boil, stir in half a tea-cup, taking care not to have it lumpy; boil twenty minutes, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Two quarts canned tomatoes will answer. - Mrs. Col. Reid, Delaware.
A large-batch beef-and-tomato soup thickened with a butter-flour paste stirred in at the boil. Nothing here is unsafe; the work is in scaling it down and in getting the thickening smooth.
- Scale it downOne gallon of stock plus three quarts of tomatoes makes roughly seven quarts of soup before sieving, enough for 20 or more servings. Quartering the recipe gives 4 cups stock, a quarter of the tomatoes (about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of sieved purée) and about 1 1/2 tablespoons of the butter-flour paste.
- The teacupNineteenth-century teacup measures varied, commonly given as somewhere between a gill (1/2 cup) and 3/4 cup rather than the modern 8-ounce cup measure; taking it at 3/4 cup, "half a tea-cup" of paste is roughly 1/3 cup — equal parts soft butter and flour worked together, around 2 1/2 tablespoons of each.
- Getting it lump-freeThe instruction "taking care not to have it lumpy" is the hinge. Work the butter and flour into a smooth uncooked paste (beurre manié), then drop it in in small pieces and whisk as each dissolves; adding it in one mass into boiling liquid is what causes lumps.
- Sieving the tomatoesThree quarts of fresh tomatoes pushed through a fine sieve yields about 6 to 7 cups of purée. Modern shortcut: quarter them, cook 10 minutes to loosen, then pass through a food mill or blend and strain. Skinning by dipping in boiling water for 20 seconds still works best.
- Canned tomatoesThe suggested substitution holds, though canned tomatoes today are firmer and packed with added acid and often calcium chloride; they still need sieving to lose seeds and skin fragments. Use whole peeled rather than crushed for the cleanest flavour.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes at a boil is enough to cook out the raw flour and marry the stock and tomato. Longer at a hard boil dulls the tomato; hold it at a bare simmer if it has to wait.
- Curdling and separationTomato acid can make the soup look broken if dairy is added. This version uses no milk or cream, so keep it that way, or temper any cream in off the heat at the end.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are the only seasonings given, which assumes a well-made beef stock. With commercial stock the soup tends to taste flat; a bay leaf and a little sugar to offset the tomato acid are period-appropriate corrections.
Tomato soup appears in American cookbooks well before the Civil War, and by the postwar decades canned tomatoes had become one of the first cheaply available packed vegetables — which is exactly why Mrs. Reid can offer "two quarts canned tomatoes will answer" as an unremarkable alternative. What is notable is the base: this is a meat soup with tomato in it, built on a gallon of beef stock, rather than the cream-and-tomato soup that later became the American default. The Dixie Cook-Book, like its sibling Buckeye Cookery, was assembled from contributed receipts and credited them by name and town, so the attribution to a colonel's wife in Delaware — which, given the Buckeye lineage, may well mean Delaware, Ohio rather than the state — is a reminder that these Southern-branded compilations drew freely on a national network of correspondents.