It is imperative to use the best and ripest tomatoes you can for this soup. Don’t make it at all if you can only find pale, unripe, out-of-season ones.

Ingredients

Serves 4

2kg best-quality vine tomatoes
½ onion
4 cloves garlic
100g unsalted butter
Extra virgin olive oil
1 dsp tomato ketchup
1 stick celery
1 bunch thyme
Up to 500ml full-fat milk
225ml double cream
Salt and pepper

Halve the tomatoes and scoop out the seeds. Put the pulp in a sieve set over a bowl to collect the juices. Chop the flesh.

Peel and finely chop the onion and garlic. Heat 50g of the butter and a little olive oil in a casserole, then, over a medium heat, sweat the onions and garlic for five minutes. Add the tomatoes, tomato juice, ketchup, celery and thyme; bring to the boil, then simmer until reduced by two-thirds.

Remove the celery and thyme, then pass the remaining contents of the pan twice through a fine-meshed sieve suspended over a bowl, rubbing it through the sieve with the back of a spoon. If you have a conical sieve, this job will be easier — force the soup with a ladle. It is important to force through nearly all of the pulp, otherwise you will lose a lot of the flavour and be left with a bowl of insipid liquid.

Measure the liquid; you should have approximately 500ml of tomato juice. If, for some reason, you have less than this, top it back up again to 500ml with half water and half milk. If, on the other hand, you have more than required, return to the casserole and reduce as necessary.

To serve, simmer gently with all the cream for 45 minutes. If, at the end of that time, it still has that “raw cream” flavour, simmer it for a bit longer. Whisk in the remaining butter and, if necessary, thin down with a little more milk or water. Season with salt and pepper, and let the taste take you back to your childhood.

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