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Twenty-Minute Soup
One quart of canned tomatoes; when scalding hot, add a heaping teaspoonful of soda, salt and pepper, a little butter, three crackers rolled fine. When ready for the table add a quart of boiling milk and serve immediately.
A cream of tomato soup built on the old trick of neutralising the tomatoes with baking soda so the milk will not curdle. Two things decide whether it works: how much soda goes in, and how long the soup sits after the milk is added.
- The soda is the hingeSoda raises the pH of the tomatoes so the milk proteins do not clot on contact. A heaping teaspoonful for a quart is far more than needed and will leave a flat, faintly soapy taste along with a violent foam-up. Start with 1/4 teaspoon, add it off the heat over the sink, and stop as soon as the fizzing subsides.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inThe soup can separate if it simmers with the milk in it, even when the tomatoes have been neutralised. Combine the hot tomato base and the scalded milk at the last moment and take it straight to the table, exactly as written.
- Pour tomato into milkAdding the acidic tomato to the hot milk, rather than the reverse, is commonly suggested as a further margin against curdling; here the two are in equal quantity, a quart each.
- "Scalding hot" and "boiling milk"Scalding means just below a simmer, roughly 180-190F, with steam rising and small bubbles at the edge. Milk brought to a full rolling boil will skin over and catch on the pan bottom; heat it to the same 180F and hold it there.
- Three crackers, rolled fineThese would be soda crackers or the thick common crackers of the period, and they act as the thickener. Three of them is perhaps 1/3 cup of fine crumbs; unsalted saltines work, about 8 to 10 of them, and if you use salted ones cut back on the added salt accordingly.
- Canned tomatoes then and nowA quart of 1900s canned tomatoes meant whole tomatoes packed in their own juice, not purée or a seasoned sauce. Use a 28-ounce can plus a little of a second, juice included, and break them up or pass the base through a sieve if you want it smooth.
- Butter"A little" here is 1 to 2 tablespoons for the full quart. It is for body and gloss, not for frying anything.
- YieldTwo quarts finished, which is six generous first-course servings. It does not reheat well, so make what you will eat.
Cream of tomato soup thickened with cracker crumbs and rescued with a pinch of soda was one of the great beneficiaries of the canned-tomato trade, which is generally credited with making a quart of tomatoes a year-round pantry staple in American households rather than a September luxury. The soda trick appears in cookbooks throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and rests on sound chemistry, even if the amounts given were often reckless; commercial condensed tomato soups later found their own ways around the same curdling problem. The title is the real period signature: twenty minutes, start to table, from two things already on the shelf. Books of this era are often said to have been written with an eye to households with fewer servants and less time, and the promise of speed had become a selling point in its own right.