Cream of Tomato Soup

This is my Mom’s recipe.  When she was very young, maybe in her early 20’s she went to the Ballard School of Cooking in New York City.  She learned to cook and bake, better, because I’m pretty sure she knew her way around the kitchen before she went.  I just recently revisited this recipe because I had an overabundance of tomatoes.

Last year was the start of it.  I had so many tomatoes and was determined to do something with them besides give them away to my husband’s customers and friends and relatives  (even though I did do that a little).  I made tomato sauce (way too time consuming), oven dried tomatoes (very tasty but again time consuming and how many did I really need?) and finally Garden Fresh Tomato soup from All Recipes.  I liked this recipe but tweaked it so much, I finally wrote on the recipe at the end of making a few batches “Try combining this with my Mom’s recipe next time.” and so I did.  Instead of using canned tomatoes, which is called for in my Mom’s recipe, I used fresh cut up tomatoes.  And I used ALL of my tomatoes.  Yum!

*If you use cherry tomatoes, just cut them in half.  Regular tomatoes, just cut up roughly.  Any variety will do EXCEPT a paste tomato, they will not have enough juice, which is great for sauce but we need the juice for this recipe.

Also, this recipe is easily doubled.

Cream of Tomato Soup from Helen Girling

1-1/2 pounds of cut up *tomatoes, skin on, seeds included, everything except the stem part

1 medium onion, sliced

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

bit of bay leaf

4 peppercorns

4 whole cloves

4 whole allspice

1/4 teaspoon paprika

Combine all ingredients into a medium/large saucepan.  Bring to a simmer over medium heat and cook, covered for 30 minutes.  Strain and set juice aside.  This makes about 2 cups of juice.  This juice can be frozen, if you happen to make a lot and want to save it for another time.  You cannot  freeze it once you have added the cream part.

Cream part of soup:

1 cup milk

2 tablespoons flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

Combine milk, flour and salt in a medium/large saucepan.  Stir with a whisk until flour is dissolved into the milk.  Put pan on medium heat and add butter.  Stir until butter is melted.  Keep on stirring until slightly thickened.   Pour tomato juice into milk mixture and stir until combined.  Heat mixture and serve immediately.  Any leftover soup can be refrigerated but only lasts for a couple of days.  Just make what you need.  Delicious with a classic grilled cheese sandwich! White bread and yellow American cheese or bread and cheese combo of your choice!  Just make sure you grill/cook it with plenty of butter :).

tomatoes, onion, herbs, etc. with cherry tomatoes:

with regular tomatoes:

stir to combine:

and simmer (make sure to cover, do not want any of that juice to escape):

strain tomato mixture, pressing to extract as much juice as possible:

juice (I had made a double batch because I had so many tomatoes):

cream ingredients:

milk, flour, salt and stir to combine:

add butter and simmer until slightly thick:

add juice, heat and serve:

yum!