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Cream of Tomato Soup
Cook one dozen, or one can of tomatoes and pass through sieve; to one quart of pulp add half teaspoonful of soda. Put one tablespoonful of butter in saucepan and when it bubbles, stir in one tablespoonful of flour; when flour is cooked, add to tomatoes, and one pint of hot milk, salt and pepper, a dash of cayenne; heat thoroughly without boiling and serve at once. A cup of whipped cream improves it, but good without the cream.
A plain turn-of-the-century cream soup that depends on one trick: keeping the acid of the tomato from curdling the milk. Everything else is a thin roux and seasoning.
- The hinge is the sodaThe half teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough tomato acid to stop the milk breaking. Add it to the warm pulp off the heat and expect vigorous foaming; too much soda leaves a soapy, flat taste, so measure it level rather than heaping.
- Never let it boilOnce the milk is in, keep the soup below a simmer. Boiling both curdles the mixture and drives off the fresh tomato flavour the soda has already dulled.
- QuantitiesA dozen ripe tomatoes may or may not give the quart of sieved pulp the recipe calls for, depending on their size; expect to need a good few pounds. A large modern can (about 28 oz) is in roughly the same range. Can sizes were not standardised at the time, so treat the substitution as approximate and make up the quart as needed.
- Passing through a sieveThe point is to remove skins and seeds, not to purée. A food mill or a blender followed by a fine sieve does the same job in less time.
- The rouxOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to three pints of liquid is a very light thickening. Cook the flour a minute or two until it smells nutty but takes no colour, then whisk in a ladle of hot tomato before adding the rest, or it will lump.
- Order of combiningStir the hot milk into the thickened tomato rather than the reverse, and do it in a steady stream. Adding cold milk to hot acid pulp is the surest way to get flecks.
- YieldAbout six cups, serving four to six as a first course.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, softly whipped, spooned on at the table rather than stirred in, as the recipe's 'a cup of whipped cream improves it' suggests. Whipped cream garnishes turn up often on cream soups in cookbooks of this period, and spooning it on does more for the texture than cooking the same cream into the pot.
Cream of tomato soup belongs to the first American generation that could count on canned tomatoes year-round, which is why this recipe offers "one dozen, or one can" as equal options without comment. Commercial tomato canning expanded rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and by the 1890s a tin of tomatoes was among the cheapest reliable vegetables in a city pantry. The baking soda trick appears in cookbook after cookbook of the era, often with the same terse instruction and rarely with an explanation; home cooks knew that milk and tomato quarrel, and soda was the accepted referee before anyone in a domestic kitchen talked about pH. The soup's later fame as a canned product is generally traced to the condensed tomato soup that Campbell's introduced in the 1890s, a condensed tomato base to which the buyer added liquid, which put tomato soup in every grocery store and eventually made the homemade one a matter of choice rather than necessity.