Home › The World's Kitchen › Chicken Broth, Tomate
Chicken Broth, Tomate
Prepare a chicken broth, pour in two gills tomato sauce, boil for five minutes, divide broth into six cups and serve.
A one-line soup that assumes you already have two things on hand: a pot of chicken broth and a made tomato sauce. Both need translating.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of tomato sauce. Judge by color and taste rather than volume if your sauce is thicker or thinner than a classic thin sauce.
- How much brothThe original never says. It divides into six serving cups, so work back from those: roughly five cups of broth, which with the cup of sauce fills six cups of 6 to 8 oz. Scale to the cups you actually have.
- What "tomato sauce" meantIn cookbooks of this vintage it is a thin cooked sauce: tomatoes with stock, onion, and often a little flour or roux, strained smooth. It is not a jarred pasta sauce, which will make the soup heavy and sweet. Passata cooked briefly with a little onion and butter, then strained, is closer.
- Don't hard-boil itFive minutes at a rolling boil will cloud a carefully made broth and dull the tomato. Bring it just to a simmer, hold it there five minutes to marry the two, and skim any scum or fat that rises.
- Season at the endBoth components are usually salted already, and reducing concentrates them. Taste after the five minutes and adjust with salt and a few grains of cayenne or a squeeze of lemon if the tomato tastes flat.
- The cups"Six cups" most likely means six bouillon or consomme cups of 6 to 8 oz each, served as a first course rather than a bowl of soup. Warm them first, since this small a volume cools fast.
- ServingA spoon of whipped cream, a little chopped parsley, or cheese straws alongside are all period accompaniments for a cup of clear soup. Rice or small pasta can be cooked separately and dropped in, but not simmered in the soup, which would cloud it.
Naming a dish for its defining ingredient in French form — broth, tomate — is a habit of the professional hotel and restaurant kitchens whose vocabulary filled English-language "international" cookbooks. Such books often drew on the French brigade system, where a house kitchen kept stock and a handful of mother sauces going all day, so a recipe like this one is less a set of instructions than a note on how to combine two things already standing on the stove. Tomato-flavored clear soups are generally said to have become more common as canned and bottled tomato products spread and made the flavor available year-round; before that, a tomato soup was a seasonal dish. The instruction to divide the broth into cups rather than plates marks it as a light opening course, the sort of thing served at the start of a long menu where a heavier soup would have been out of place.