Original 4B’s Homemade Tomato Soup

Introduction

Yesterday, I spent time doing four of my favorite activities. I read, finishing a comic mystery titled The Trouble With San Francisco (link below). I took a few photographs, including the day lily at the top of this page and the photos of the food shown in this post. There was some time to nap outdoors in the porch swing, and I cooked. Specifically I cooked some original 4B’s homemade Tomato Soup, using a recipe I found in CopyKat.com. The recipe below comes directly from the website created by Stephanie Manley. If you like to cook, I recommend her site highly. Just looking at her home page I’m ready to get back in the kitchen and fix some more meal delights.

4B’s and their wonderful tomato soup

You could not grow up in Montana in the 1950s and not know 4B’s. Bill Hainline opened the first 4B’s in Missoula in the 1940s. The four Bs were Bill, Barbara (his wife), Bill Junior (son) and Barbara (daughter). Ever the entrepreneur, Hainline grew his restaurant into a chain that covered the state of Montana. The first restaurant I remember from my childhood was the 4B’s in Deer Lodge. I have eaten in 4B’s in Billings, Bozeman, Deer Lodge, Havre, Miles City, Missoula and Polson. In 2007, a Scottsdale, Arizona company bought the chain, and many of the restaurants closed. Today, the name remains with restaurants in a few locations around the state, but it’s not the same at all.

In the past, if you went to a 4B’s, you knew exactly what you would get. And one of the best items on the menu was their tomato soup. Momma made tomato soup on the rare occasion, but I’d bet that most Americans grew up with Campbell’s. Our pantries resembled an Andy Warhol pop art piece–all those red and white cans. 4B’s tomato soup was nothing like Campbell’s. And it’s so easy to make, why open a can when you can have scrumptious home made tomato soup with just a little more effort.

My version of the soup

Kevin suggested that since he had some left over chopped tomatoes, I should make our favorite Original 4B’s Homemade Tomato Soup. There really is nothing like it. And no, I did not use the lovely tomatoes growing in our garden. The owner of Southshore Nursery in Polson is retiring and had a going-out-of-business sale. We bought four tomato plants and brought them home. They did not like being transplanted, but are beginning to come out of their shock. They are blossoming and setting new fruit, so we should have a good harvest, but for now, I used store bought tomatoes. The soup will be better with home-grown produce, I know.

Note that the recipe calls for canned diced tomatoes. I did not used canned tomatoes. We had plenty in the fridge, and that’s what I used. I believe that using fresh tomatoes had an impact on the color of the soup–it wasn’t as pink as soup made with canned tomatoes and their liquid, would have been. Also, Kevin cannot eat onion, so no chopped onion went into this batch. Instead I used onion powder which he can tolerate. The final change to the recipe below is that I don’t heat the cream separately. I’ve done that in the past and honestly, I can’t see any difference in color, taste or consistency. I let the soup simmer for 45 minutes, then add the cream for the last 15. But you may well want to try it both ways (heated/unheated cream) and see if you can tell any difference. So here’s the recipe:

What do you have with tomato soup?

Personally, I can’t eat tomato soup without a grilled cheese sandwich. That’s what you got at 4B’s. it’s how I grew up, and therefore it’s right! Regular readers will remember that a couple of days ago I baked a loaf of Craked Wheat White Bread adapting a recipe from the Sunset Bread Book (link below). I told Kevin that since I was making the soup he had requested, he could make me a grilled cheese sandwich using the cracked wheat bread. And he did! It was delicious.

I did more cooking in the evening, making up a Spanish rice casserole for supper then adding some Mango Sour Cream Ice Cream for dessert. I made up the casserole recipe as I went along, using the left over Original 4B’s Homemade Tomato Soup with a cup of chicken stock to cook the rice in my rice cooker. The ice cream recipe comes from The Ice Cream Bible by Robert Rose (link below). The recipe as written calls for the fruit of one mango, or 1 1/2 cups of mango, but my mango wasn’t that large, so I added a nectarine to the mix, but kept everything else the same. I think this may be my new favorite home made ice cream flavor.

I’m baking new bread today, and who knows what else I’ll get up to, so stay tuned and check in tomorrow! And to read yesterday’s post, just click here.

TTFN

(And by the way, should you choose to buy any books from the links below, I get a small portion of the sales price. Full disclosure, don’t ya know.)