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Puree of Tomato and Celery
Cut two small stalks celery into small pieces, wash thoroughly and place in a saucepan with four pints water, season with a teaspoon salt and boil for thirty-five minutes; strain the liquor into a basin, then pound the celery in a mortar to a pulp and return it to the broth. Place a mirepoix in a large saucepan with one and a half tablespoons butter and brown on the range for ten minutes, occasionally stirring; sprinkle over one ounce flour, mix well, add a pint fresh crushed or canned tomatoes and pour in the celery broth, etc. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and one tablespoon sugar; mix well, cover the pan and let slowly boil for one hour. Remove, strain through a Chinese strainer into a basin, add an ounce butter, lightly mix, then pour into a soup tureen and serve with a plate of croutons separately.
A classic French-style purée soup, written for a kitchen that assumed a mortar and a stockpot. The vocabulary is the main obstacle; the method itself is straightforward.
- MirepoixThe recipe assumes you know it: roughly diced onion, carrot and celery, often with a little bacon or ham and a bay leaf, cut small since it will be strained out. For this quantity of soup, about one medium onion, one carrot and a rib or two of celery is right.
- "Two small stalks celery"Older cookery writing often uses "stalk" for the whole head rather than a single rib, and given four pints of water that reading makes better sense of the broth's flavour. The recipe does not say which it means, so two small heads, trimmed, is a judgement call rather than a certainty.
- UnitsFour pints is 8 cups; one pint of tomatoes is 2 cups, which is a little more than a standard 14- or 15-oz can with its juice. One ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup by volume.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh sieve. A regular fine sieve works if you press the solids through with a ladle; skipping this step leaves the mirepoix fibres in the soup.
- Pounding the celeryThe mortar step exists because there was no blender. A food processor or immersion blender does it in seconds, and since everything is strained afterwards the texture of the purée matters less than getting the flavour back into the broth.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer. A full hour at a real boil will reduce 8 cups of thin broth too far and scorch the roux on the bottom of the pan.
- The finishing butterThe ounce of butter goes in off the heat and is stirred, not boiled. That is what gives the soup its gloss and body; boil it and the emulsion breaks and the fat separates.
- Sugar and seasoningA tablespoon of sugar sounds like a lot but is balancing the acid of the tomatoes. Add half, taste after straining, and adjust — canned tomatoes vary widely in sweetness.
- YieldRoughly 2½ quarts of liquid going into the pot, nearer 2 quarts after the hour's simmer; six to eight as a first course. Croutons served separately, as directed, so they stay crisp.
Purée soups of this kind are a staple of the late nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire: a browned mirepoix, a little flour, a liquid, a long slow simmer and a forced strain, finished off the heat with butter. The formula is French kitchen grammar, carried into English-language cookbooks written for American households. The instruction to pound the celery in a mortar and then return it to its own cooking water is worth noting: it reflects a kitchen where nothing flavourful was discarded and where extracting the last of a vegetable's taste was hand labour.