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Parker House Soup
For two quarts of soup, three pints of any good stock, one-half of a turnip, one-half of a small beet, one onion, one quart of red tomatoes. Boil and strain. Place four ounces of butter in a saucepan over the fire; when hot, brown two small tablespoonfuls of flour in the same; mix this with a half pint of soup and return to the kettle; salt and pepper and a teaspoonful of sugar.
A thickened tomato-and-root vegetable soup built on the classic hotel formula: strained puree finished with a brown roux. The original assumes you already have stock and know how to handle a roux.
- Quantities in modern termsThree pints is 6 cups of stock; a half pint is 1 cup. The quart of tomatoes is about 2 lb fresh or one 28-oz can with its juice. Yield is the stated two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course.
- The roux is the hingeFour ounces of butter to two tablespoons of flour is very heavy on fat — that ratio will not bind. Use equal weights, roughly 2 oz (4 tablespoons) butter to 2 oz flour, and cook it to a nut-brown color before adding liquid. Browning the flour is the point of the recipe; a pale roux gives a raw, pasty soup.
- TemperingWhisking a cup of the hot strained soup into the roux off the heat before returning it to the kettle is the correct order and prevents lumps. Once combined, simmer 10 minutes to cook out any floury taste.
- The beetHalf a small beet is presumably there as much for color as for flavor; it deepens the tomato toward a russet red. Peel and dice it so it cooks through with the other vegetables.
- Boil and strainSimmer the vegetables in the stock 30-40 minutes until fully soft, then pass through a sieve or food mill. A blender followed by a strainer gives a smoother result than the period method and loses less volume.
- SeasoningThe teaspoon of sugar is corrective, meant to take the edge off acid tomatoes. Taste first; ripe summer tomatoes or a good canned brand may need none.
The Parker House, opened in Boston in 1855, was one of the American hotels whose kitchen output became shorthand for refined cooking — its name is attached to Parker House rolls, Boston cream pie, and, as here, a soup. Compilers of the period sometimes attached hotel and restaurant names to household recipes, and it is often impossible to say whether such a formula ever left the hotel's own kitchen. What the recipe does show is the presence of the French brown roux in American home cooking: a tomato soup that might otherwise have been thickened with bread or rice is here bound with browned flour and butter, in the manner of a hotel sauce cook.