Although tomatoes apparently were introduced into Florida in the 1600s, they made minimal impression on the dietary habits of Americans until two centuries later. The first tomato soup recipes were simply tomatoes added to basic vegetable soups.
By 1840s tomatoes were an important part of most cookery books, Modern Cookery, written by the British cookbook author Eliza Acton for publication in the United States, in 1845 contained several tomato recipes.
Between 1832 when N. M. K. Lee’s first tomato soup recipe was published and in 1841, when Lettice Bryan’s version published the multitude of other vegetable were left out and the purely tomato soup know today emerge. Lettice Bryan’s Kentucky Housewife feature more than twenty tomato recipes, including some for baked, broiled, stewed, fried and pickled tomatoes.
Andrew Smith in his The Tomato in America stated that tomatoes were used in soup at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century in colonial America.
In 1897, John T Dorrance created a process of condensing soup which involved removing half of the water from the soup to create a thicker consistency.
The first production in 1898 means reducing volume to make it lighter and more transportable, cheaper to can and yet convenient to cook was a new development of a specifically commercial commodity food.
History of tomato soup in America
