The Creamy Origins Of Tomato Soup

Grilled cheese and tomato soup are, inarguably, one of the best-paired comfort meals in America. The wonderful flavor combination runs the gamut of culinary classes. Many of us have had a harried parent prepare us a slapdash grilled cheese made of Wonderbread and craft singles, served alongside a piping hot bowl of Campbell's tomato soup that was made with milk to add a little extra kick of creaminess. This tomato soup with 'grilled cheese' recipe boasts a broth made of roasted tomato and sweet onion blend mixed with white wine, which is served with gruyere crisps, while this creamy tomato-basil soup brings chicken broth, diced carrots, and heavy whipping cream into the fold.

You can't help but wonder when people first started to enjoy this classic combo. Of course, it's easy to imagine that bread and cheese have been paired with one another since time immemorial. Tomato soup, on the other hand, is a more complex dish, and as such, only became a widely-enjoyed dish in relatively recent history.

Though it's difficult to imagine the many types of Western cuisine existing without tomatoes, it was quite some time before they became a staple ingredient. In fact, only a few hundred years ago, they were known as "poison apples" in Europe. Across the pond in the so-called New World, the fruit's reputation wasn't doing much better. Modern Farmer tells us that tomatoes were widely considered to be poisonous in America until the 1800s, when food shortages caused by the civil war made canning a necessity, and folks found that tomatoes were eminently storable.

It's difficult to pin down exactly when tomato soup was invented. However, two recipes stand out as the earliest recorded versions of the dish. In the United States, several years before the civil war, one woman had already committed herself to crafting delicious tomato recipes. Project Gutenberg provides us with a digital copy of Eliza Leslie's 1857 tome "Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book," which details several recipes for tomato soup. The recipes all call for beef of some kind, and of course, fresh, ripe tomatoes that are cooked to release their delicious juices. According to the Bethel Public Library, Maria Parloa, one of the people who invented the field of Home Economics, published a recipe for tomato chowder in her 1872 debut "The Appledore Cook Book."

Despite the two women who pioneered the tomato soup recipe, it's fair to say that the Civil War-era introduction of canned tomatoes paved the way for tomato soup in its modern form. A few decades after the war had ended, in 1897, Campbell Soup Company released its initial line of condensed soups, one of which was tomato. The waterless soup base made it possible for the company to sell its products for less, therefore making it less expensive and more accessible for consumers.

Partially inspired by Campbell's soup, demand for tomatoes in America grew considerably in the early 1900s, per Smithsonian Magazine. In 1910, the company began its tomato breeding program. One of the first tomatoes that they cultivated, the Rutgers tomato, still exists today.

Since its introduction, Campbell's Tomato Soup has become an incredibly common feature of the American pantry. 24/7 Tempo tells us that in 2018, it was the sixth most popular canned food sold in the country.