Frenching

The tarragon tomato soup which I posted yesterday was based on a recipe from Georgeanne Brennan's Vegetarian Table - France. The book contains two great tomato soup recipes which I return to year after year. The other is a gingered tomato soup pictured below.

I remember when Bradford and I began cooking with Brennan's book. He was exasperated that the recipes direct you to remove the skins and seeds from the tomatoes: "If this is what French cooking is about, I'm not sure I'm interested." At the time, I wholeheartedly agreed. I lost all the tomatoes' juices while removing the seeds, and I found removing tomato seeds to be maddening.



These days, I appreciate Bradford's declaration but in a different sense: I think that he's absolutely right that French cooking is in many ways about refinements and details such as removing seeds and skins, sieving broths to remove solids, etc., etc. Mind you, I know that French cooking is an abstraction and thus impossible to pin down. Also, my French cooking is vegaquarian: I have no idea how meats and fowl fit into the grand scheme, but I know that they are primary, that vegetables hold a back seat-- a wayback seat-- in fine French cooking. But, back to my point about refinements and details: I'm increasingly convinced that the seeds and skins affect not only the textures of the soups but also their flavors.

The good news about Brennan's recipes is that peeling and seeding the tomatoes is the biggest step in otherwise simple recipes. Dropping ripe tomatoes in boiling water makes the peels slide right off. To seed them, I cut the tomatoes in half horizontally and use my fingers to pull the seeds and juices out into a fine-mesh sieve which I've seated in a bowl. Running a spoon through everything caught in the strainer, I extract and save all the juices. Once chopped, the tomato flesh goes right into the bowl with the juices. And voila-- gingered tomato soup, served here in an otherwise not-so-French menu.