Tomato Soup

Of all the recipes a well-intentioned person can offer, soup is perhaps the most difficult to quantify.

Laurie Colwin famously wrote about this in the essay “Soup,” found in Home Cooking. For the three people left on the planet who haven’t read Colwin, in brief, she describes soup as naturally “eccentric,” adding “No two are the same.”

Colwin goes on to describe the best soup she ever ate, made from pheasant, potatoes Anna, peas, cabbage, and stock. This soup was concocted by a friend using up her Christmas leftovers. It was impossible to replicate. Colwin tried.

This brings me to Barbara Kafka, author of the excellent Soup: A Way of Life. In addition to useful instruction and recipes, Soup features recollections of family and friends, including James Beard and Barbara Tropp.

Kafka’s introduction includes a brief paragraph entitled “vagueness.” In it, she explains soup is a forgiving food that won’t be wrecked by a bit more or less of an ingredient.

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Into the kitchen.

Tomatoes aren’t fresh right now, unless you buy flavorless baseballs from the southern hemisphere. (Or you inhabit the southern hemisphere, in which case, ignore the following.) Now is the time to use home-canned tomatoes, or to purchase a quality commercial brand.

I’ve made this soup with canned crushed tomatoes and whole Roma tomatoes. I prefer whole Romas, but both are good. The choice is yours.

There are people who claim delicious soup is possible using water as a base. My attempts at water-based soups were dismal failures, so either these people are better cooks than I am or they’re lying. Whatever the case, I strongly suggest making tomato soup with a broth base. Said broth may be chicken, vegetable, or the liquid from your canned tomatoes.

Nitpicky readers may be annoyed by my using “broth” and “stock” interchangably. I am a self-taught cook from Detroit, not a CIA graduate (the cooking school, not the government agency). I could hunt down the differences in definitions, but then this post would get longer. So let’s move on.

Most soups are improved by a mirepoix, French for a mixture of chopped onion, carrot, and celery, which is gently cooked in butter, or, in this case, butter and olive oil. This tomato soup was prepared just after Christmas. Stores were closed. I had one carrot, onion, and garlic. So I made do.

Sweating vegetables is like browning beef: you can omit the step, but it’s easy to do and improves the final dish. To sweat vegetables, melt a little butter with some olive oil (olive oil stops the butter from burning). Add the vegetables, stir them around, and partially cover the pot. Cook gently, stirring occasionally, 5-7 minutes. The vegetables should soften rather than brown. If the pot starts drying up, add more butter, olive oil, or water.

Once the vegetables have softened, add the tomatoes and their liquid, the chicken broth, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, and a tiny pinch of hot pepper flakes.

I added a shot glass of dry Marsala. This is optional. So optional that there’s no photograph. Instead, a totally unrelated shot of a florist’s window in Berkeley.

If you want to include root vegetables in the soup, add them now. Either way, bring the tomato soup to a simmer. Let it cook for at least an hour. After an hour, add leafy vegetables like spinach, baby kale, or chard leaves.

You can add lentils, rice, or pasta to the soup either midway through cooking or 45 minutes before serving.  If you add the starches at the midway point, they will expand, thickening the tomato soup. They’ll also drink up some broth, which isn’t a bad thing. Just know you’ll need to add either more broth, more water, or both.

Tomato soup needs a fair amount of salt and pepper; season generously. You might also want to add a squeeze of lemon at the end of cooking time.

A final note….

Leftover cooking juices from roasts, fat and all, may be frozen and saved for moment like this. I had about a quarter cup (60ml) of cooking juices from our Christmas dinner of veal steaks. Defrosted and tipped into the soup, they made a subtle yet flavorful addition.

Not beautiful. But tasty.

Tomato Soup is a meal in itself, needing nothing more than good bread alongside.