Regardless of the temperature outside, I have been craving tomato soup, and have indulged in it a few times the past couple of weeks. Just turn your thermostat down a degree or two, and light a spicy candle, and it's easy to pretend fall is nigh.
The cusp of fall is also a time when gardens are finishing up their tomato boom, and gardeners are frantically canning and freezing their bumper crops of various vegetables. I remember many steamy August days in our non-air-conditioned house with the pressure cooker running full blast on the stove as my dad and mom worked to preserve as much as they could for the colder months. (I helped with blanching and freezing things...I was less interested in learning the intricacies of the pressure cooker. I'm still so dubious about pressure cooking, I don't even use the Instant Pot I own.)
Aunt Carrie came from a long line of gardeners and knew well how to can her garden produce. Here we have three recipes for tomato soup made for canning. If you're afraid of pressure cookers like I am, these recipes all look like they could be frozen instead--after allowing the mixtures to cool, you could ladle them into freezer bags or boxes and pop them in the freezer.
All of these recipes are fairly similar. The first two call for a peck of tomatoes, which is a measurement of volume, not weight, and which is not used much any more except at farmer's markets. (I bought a half-peck of Autumn Crisp apples when I was in Ohio two weeks ago.) A Google search will send you down a rabbit hole of peck measurements of various types of produce...for our purposes, we will go with Yahoo Answers and say that a peck of tomatoes is roughly 13 pounds.
This first recipe also refers to cold pack canning...I did a cursory search on hot pack vs. cold pack canning and frankly, my eyes glazed over, so I won't attempt to address it here. If you're interested enough to read three recipes on tomato soup to can, I'm assuming you know the difference or can figure it out for yourself!
Tomato Soup to Can
1 peck tomatoes
2 stalks celery
6 onions
1 handful parsley
Cook--put through sieve. Put on stove, heat, add 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup salt. Add 1 cup flour mixed with cold tomato sauce. Stir in till thickened. Put in jars and cold pack 20 minutes
-Shirley McDaniels
The next recipe looks like something Aunt Carrie clipped from her local newspaper when she lived in northwestern Pennsylvania. It specifies adding milk to the soup when serving to make more of a creamy soup. Yum!
Tomato Soup
1 peck tomatoes
3 large stalks celery
3 onions
1/8 cup salt
1/4 pound butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
water
Cook tomatoes, celery, onions and salt. Put through sieve. Mix butter, sugar and flour, add enough water to make paste, add to tomato juice. Boil (careful not to let stick.) Pour into canning jars, put into a boiling bath. Process quarts for 20 minutes. To serve add 2 cups milk per quart.
This next recipe has the word "Budget" written next to the title--this does not mean it's a budget or economical recipe, but rather that Aunt Carrie found it in The Budget, an old and venerated newspaper that serves the Amish and conservative Mennonite communities of northeastern Ohio and beyond. You can subscribe to a national edition of The Budget for $48/year.
Of the three recipes, this one sounds the most appealing to me, probably because it has more flavor enhancers with the cloves, bay leaf, and celery salt. It also has much less sugar than the first two. You do need at least a little sugar with most tomato recipes, to cut the acidity and bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes, but 1 cup of sugar in the previous recipes sounded like a lot. On the flip side, this recipe calls for more fat, a full cup. I'm sure every cook had her own personal recipe back in the day.
I also enjoyed the direction "Cook until done." It always makes me panic a little when I see those words in an old recipe. Not helpful, lady cooks of the past! Not helpful at all!
Did you know that the # sign used to mean "pounds," not "hashtag"?? If you're over 40, you do! #tomatosoup #oldAF #loveyoumillenials
Homemade Tomato Soup
1/2 t. whole cloves
1 chopped green pepper
1 chopped onion
1 bay leaf
1/3 cup sugar
2 sticks margarine
2/3 cup flour
4 t. salt
2 t. celery salt
Combine tomatoes, onion, cloves, bay leaf and green pepper and cook until done. Place in colander. Combine sugar, margarine, flour and a small amount of water and add to tomato mixture. Add salt and celery salt and cook twenty minutes. Place into jars and seal.
Martha Unruh
Halstead, Kansas
