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Cream of Tomato Soup
1 teaspoon salt Pepper 1 quart milk 1 slice onion cup flour cup butter 1-41-4 Stew tomato and sugar, strain, add soda and seasoning. Scald milk in double boiler with one slice onion. Add flour well blended with butter; cook thoroughly. Remove onion from milk. Combine mixtures, adding tomato to milk slowly, strain, serve at once in a hot dish. Fat salt pork, 1 inch by 3 inches 1 sliced onion
The ingredient list has come through the scanner badly mangled, and part of the following recipe has bled onto the end of the page. The method, though, is intact and is the standard cream-of-tomato procedure of the period: a thin white sauce, a strained tomato purée, and a careful marriage of the two.
- What the mangled measurements mean"cup flour cup butter 1-41-4" is a collapsed fraction column: 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup butter. That ratio with 1 quart of milk gives a light cream soup rather than a thick one.
- What is genuinely missingNo quantity survives for the tomato, the sugar, or the soda. Comparable recipes of the period pair a quart of milk with somewhere between a pint and a quart of stewed or canned tomato; the sugar would be a teaspoon or so and the soda a scant quarter teaspoon. These are reconstructions, not what the book says.
- The stray last line"Fat salt pork, 1 inch by 3 inches / 1 sliced onion" belongs to the next recipe in the section, not to this one. Ignore it.
- The hinge: keeping it from curdlingTomato acid clots hot milk. The instruction to add the tomato to the milk slowly — not the reverse — is the whole point, and both mixtures should be hot but not boiling when they meet. Serve immediately; the soup will separate if it stands over heat.
- About the sodaThe pinch of baking soda neutralises tomato acidity and was standard insurance in cookery of this period. It also flattens the tomato flavour and can leave a soapy note if overdone. It can be omitted if you rely instead on temperature control and the flour in the sauce to hold the mixture together.
- ScaldingScalded milk is heated to about 180F, until it steams and a rim of small bubbles forms at the edge — not to a boil. The double boiler is there to keep the milk off direct heat; a heavy saucepan over low heat works if you watch it.
- Cook the roux thoroughly"Cook thoroughly" means letting the butter-flour paste bubble in the milk for several minutes so the starch loses its raw taste and thickens fully. A minute is not enough.
- StrainingThe tomato is strained after stewing to remove skins and seeds, and the finished soup is strained again for smoothness. A food mill or a fine sieve does both jobs.
- YieldDepends on how much tomato you use: with a quart of milk, roughly six to eight cups, serving four to six as a first course.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to the era when canned tomatoes became a year-round pantry staple in American households, and the combination of tomato with a milk-based white sauce was a fixture of home and institutional cookery around the time it began to be sold in a can. The soda trick recorded here appears to be a period signature: it turns up in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, because it solved a real problem that home cooks met the moment they poured acid into hot milk. The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets distributed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to its policyholders, part of a broader push by insurers into public-health and domestic-economy advice he the the the recipes and the emphasis on milk, a food the company's health literature promoted heavily.