Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Soup

A simple tomato soup made with canned tomatoes, water, flour, fat, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Tomato Soup

Why it works: Tomato and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine canned tomatoes and an equal amount of water in a pot. Simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Mix flour with beef dripping or bacon fat until smooth. Add the flour mixture to the simmering tomatoes.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt. If acidic, stir in sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice or hard bread crumbs.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + beeftop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + ricetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,265 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, flavor and acidity of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it cooks, giving the soup a smoother body.
Beef dripping or bacon fat
Carries flavor and adds richness to the soup.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of acidic tomatoes, adding a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Mix the flour into the fat until smooth before adding it. Flour dropped directly into hot liquid clumps as its starch surface gels before it disperses. Blending it smoothly with fat first coats each particle, letting it disperse evenly so the soup thickens without lumps.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, pepper, sugar, rice):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, pepper, sugar, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More tomato soup recipes

Cream 27Clear 14Creamed 10Creamy 8French 8with Rice 8 See all 632 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes