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Tomato with Rice
Prepare a tomato puree, but instead of vermicelli use the same quantity fresh, hot, boiled rice. Boil for five minutes and serve.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have already made the book's tomato pur e soup and simply swaps the garnish. Everything that matters is in what it leaves unsaid.
- "Tomato puree" means the soupIn books of this period a puree is a thickened, strained soup, not the canned tomato concentrate sold under that name today. Read it as sieved tomato soup; the quantity and the manner of thickening depend on the book's base recipe, which this entry does not restate.
- Cook the rice separatelyThe instruction is explicit that the rice goes in already boiled and hot. Raw rice simmered in tomato soup will release starch, cloud the pur e and thicken it unpredictably as it stands.
- Five minutes is the whole pointFive minutes is the point -- The brief boil appears to be there to reheat the rice and marry it with the soup rather than to cook it further. Rice held longer in the pot will keep softening and breaking up.
- Season at the endUnsalted boiled rice will flatten a seasoned soup. Taste and correct for salt after the five minutes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. It thickens noticeably on standing; thin with a little hot stock rather than water when reheating.
Tomato soup finished with a starch garnish -- vermicelli, tapioca, sago, barley, rice -- was a common treatment around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the era often printed a base soup once and then a run of one-line variations after it, as here. Rice with tomato has Italian and Spanish antecedents, and the pairing spread as tomatoes became cheap and canned tomato products more widely available in the later nineteenth century.