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Cream Tomato Soup
Cook one quart or one dozen tomatoes and one onion, press through a sieve. Put three tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan. When it bubbles stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour; add one-half teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of sugar, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper, or paprika, or cayenne or tobasco. Have one quart of milk very hot without boiling, tomatoes boiling, add seasoning, and one-half teaspoonful of soda; then add hot milk and one cupful of whipped cream and serve at once. Delicious.
A turn-of-the-century cream soup that hinges entirely on keeping acid and milk from meeting badly. The method is sound, but the original leaves the order of a few steps to the cook's judgment.
- The hinge: soda and temperatureThe half teaspoon of soda neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk from curdling; it goes into the boiling tomato, not the milk, and will foam up hard, so use a pan with headroom. Both liquids must be hot when they meet, and the soup must not boil after the milk goes in.
- Where the roux fitsThe recipe never says explicitly, but the seasoned butter-and-flour roux is meant to take the strained tomato purée, whisked in gradually to make a thickened base. Cook the flour a minute in the bubbling butter before adding liquid or the soup tastes pasty.
- One quart or one dozen tomatoesRoughly 2 to 3 lb of ripe tomatoes, quartered and stewed with the onion for 15-20 minutes, then pressed through a sieve. A 28 oz can of whole tomatoes, juice included, is a fair substitute out of season and needs no sieving if you blend it.
- The onionA single medium onion, halved or roughly cut, is enough; it is cooked with the tomato purely for flavour and goes through the sieve with everything else. Skins and cores are caught by the sieve, so there is no need to peel the tomatoes first.
- Seasoning choiceWhite pepper, paprika, cayenne and Tabasco are offered as alternatives, not additions. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne is a great deal more assertive than a quarter teaspoon of white pepper -- scale accordingly.
- Whipped creamThe cup of whipped cream can be stirred in at the end or floated on each portion; the recipe's own wording points to stirring it in. Whip it to soft peaks only, and add it off the heat so it does not deflate into plain cream.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. It does not hold or reheat well -- the soda flavour sharpens and the cream separates -- so make it to be eaten.
Cream of tomato belongs to the era when canned tomatoes and reliable household milk supplies made a smooth, pale soup an everyday possibility rather than a hotel dish. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s return again and again to the curdling problem, and the pinch of soda is one common contemporary answer, alongside the alternative trick of thickening the tomato first so the starch holds the emulsion. The list of four interchangeable peppers -- white, paprika, cayenne, Tabasco -- is itself a period marker: paprika was newly fashionable in American kitchens, and Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the late 1860s, had by this point become a pantry staple far from the Gulf. The concluding "Delicious" reflects a habit common in cookbooks where recipes came in from contributors who vouched for them personally.