Home › Soups › Spiced Tomato Soup
Spiced Tomato Soup
Arrange the usual clear tomato broth, add six whole cloves, three grains of allspice and small stick of cinnamon, and boil with the soup. Season as if there were no spice used, and when ready to serve strain clear.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have a clear tomato broth on the stove and tells you only what to add to it. The whole point is restraint: whole spices, briefly boiled, then strained out entirely.
- "The usual clear tomato broth"The recipe assumes a broth given elsewhere in the book. Such broths were generally tomatoes stewed with aromatics and stock or water, then strained until the liquid runs clear rather than pulpy; proportions varied. Whatever the strength, do not thicken it with flour or butter, or the straining is wasted.
- "Three grains of allspice"Grain here almost certainly means a single whole berry rather than the apothecary weight unit. Three allspice berries, six cloves and a small stick of cinnamon is the whole spicing; the recipe names no volume of soup, but by any reading the spicing is deliberately faint.
- Whole spices, not groundThe instruction to strain clear at the end only works with whole spice. Ground cinnamon or clove will cloud the broth and turn it gritty, and the flavour will keep building instead of stopping when you pull the spices.
- How long to boilThe recipe gives no time, only "boil with the soup". A short boil of some minutes is enough to draw the spice out; taste the broth as it goes and fish out the spices when it smells right, since long cooking lets the clove dominate.
- "Season as if there were no spice used"This is the hinge. Salt, pepper and sugar are to be judged on the tomato alone, and not reduced because the broth already smells strongly of spice.
- Acidity and sugarTinned tomatoes vary a good deal in sharpness. The recipe calls for no sugar, but if the broth tastes sour a pinch of sugar, or a little more salt if it tastes thin, will bring the fruit forward; the warm spices exaggerate any sourness left unbalanced.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve lined with a doubled square of muslin. Let it drip rather than pressing it, which pushes fine solids through and dulls the clarity the recipe is after.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of broth would serve about four in small cups as a first course. Serve it hot and unadorned.
History: Clear tomato soup appears regularly in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, helped by the spread of cheap canned tomatoes. Spicing it with clove, allspice and cinnamon points back to an older habit: tomato ketchups and preserves of the mid-nineteenth century often used these same warm spices, and the soup shares their faintly sweet register. Straining the spice out entirely suits a period of formal service, where a clear soup opened the meal and was judged partly on its transparency. Books of this kind often gave a base recipe once and then a run of short variations like this one, assuming the reader had read the preceding page.