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Tomato, St. Louis
Finely slice a carrot, onion, two branches celery, half a sound green pepper and a bean garlic. Place in a saucepan with two tablespoons butter, a pound crushed, raw ham bones and gently brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Dredge in two ounces flour, briskly stir while heating for two minutes, pour in a quart crushed fresh tomatoes (or its equivalent in canned), a quart broth and one and a half pints water. Season with one and a half good teaspoons salt, a teaspoon sugar and half teaspoon pepper. Add a sprig thyme, one bay leaf, two cloves, mix well and cook for an hour and fifteen minutes, mixing at bottom once in a while. Press soup through sieve into a vessel, then through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Scald one and a half ounces pistachios in boiling water for two minutes, drain on sieve, peel and split, then add to soup with a gill cream and an ounce butter. Mix well while cooking for five minutes, pour soup in a tureen and serve.
A ham-bone-based cream of tomato, thickened with a roux and finished with cream and pistachios. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms and vessels need translating.
- A bean of garlicThis means a single clove, not a head. Filippini uses "bean" throughout for a clove.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The cream goes in at the very end with the butter.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The two-stage straining is deliberate: a coarse sieve first to push the pulp through and hold back the bones and aromatics, then the chinois to catch fibre and seed fragments. A food mill followed by a fine sieve does the same work.
- The ham bonesRaw, cracked ham bones are a butcher-counter request now rather than a shelf item. A smoked ham hock or two, split, gives the same salt-and-smoke backbone; if you use smoked rather than raw ham, hold back some of the salt until after straining and taste.
- Two ounces of flourAbout a scant half cup by weight-to-volume for all-purpose flour. Two minutes of stirring over heat is enough to cook out the raw taste without colouring the roux, which would muddy the tomato.
- Liquid and reductionA quart of tomatoes, a quart of broth and a pint and a half of water is a lot of liquid for the solids listed. The hour and a quarter of simmering is as much about reducing and concentrating as about cooking the vegetables; keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered, and stir the bottom as instructed since the roux will catch.
- PistachiosAn ounce and a half, roughly a third of a cup shelled. Scalding loosens the papery skins so the nuts stay green rather than turning brown-flecked in the soup. Use unsalted raw nuts; roasted salted ones will throw the seasoning off.
- FinishingOnce the cream and butter go in, keep the pot below a simmer for those five minutes. Hard boiling after the dairy risks the tomato acid splitting the cream.
- YieldThe original gives none. The starting liquid is about two and three-quarter quarts, so after the long uncovered simmer expect something over two quarts of finished soup, enough for six to eight as a first course.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York and wrote in the encyclopedic, restaurant-brigade manner of his generation, filing many soups under place names. The geographic tags in books of this kind are usually a chef's shorthand rather than regional documentation, and "St. Louis" here most likely marks the combination of ham and pistachio rather than anything cooked in Missouri. What the recipe does show plainly is how a professional kitchen of the period built a tomato soup: no simmering of tomatoes alone, but a browned mirepoix, cured pork bones for depth, a flour roux for body, and a straining regime severe enough to produce a completely smooth purée.