Mannheim Soup
(Germany.) To 1 quart of stock add sufficient tomatoes and herbs to make a cream when strained, heat it again, and add 1 ounce of rice and 1/2 pound of cooked salmon or shrimps chopped fine, an onion, a carrot, and thyme and parsley. Cook 1/2 hour or longer, rub through a sieve, and serve with a plate of boiled rice.
A thin tomato-and-fish purée in the older European style, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what a sieved soup should look like. The vagueness is real, so treat the quantities as a sketch.
- The ambiguity, stated plainly"Sufficient tomatoes and herbs to make a cream" gives no measure. For 1 quart of stock, about 1 1/2 lb of ripe tomatoes (or a 28 oz tin) will thicken to a cream once sieved; less than a pound leaves it watery.
- Order of operationsAs printed, the onion, carrot and herbs go in after the fish, which is backwards. Simmer the aromatics with the tomatoes and rice for the half hour, then stir the cooked salmon or shrimp in for the last few minutes so it does not turn to fibre.
- 1 ounce of riceRoughly 2 tablespoons of raw long- or medium-grain rice. It is there as a thickener, not as body; it disintegrates into the purée when you sieve.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food mill or a fine chinois does this fastest. A blender will emulsify but not remove tomato skin and seed, so pass it afterwards if you want the smooth "cream" the recipe is aiming at.
- Salmon or shrimpsHalf a pound of cooked fish, weighed after cooking. Poached salmon, leftover roast salmon, or small peeled shrimp all work; tinned salmon also behaves well here.
- SeasoningSieved tomato soups flatten out, and the original says nothing about salt. Season at the end, and a pinch of sugar will offset sharp winter tomatoes.
- The accompanying riceThe "plate of boiled rice" is passed separately for guests to spoon in, in the manner of a mulligatawny. Plan on about a cup of cooked rice for four.
- YieldA quart of stock plus tomatoes gives roughly 1 1/2 quarts of finished soup, or four to six first-course servings.
This comes from the kind of cookbook that gathered dishes from abroad and labelled them by city, so the heading tells you the compiler's source rather than any long local tradition. The construction itself is of its period: a meat stock as the base, tomatoes and a little rice cooked down and forced through a sieve to make a "cream" without cream, and cooked fish folded in at the end. A plate of plain rice offered alongside was a way to let diners thicken their own bowl.