I first had whiskey tomato soup in an Irish bar/restaurant in Minneapolis about 10 years ago. The place was called Kieran's, and has since moved to a more prominent location near Target Field in the ever-troubled Block E.
Then it was homey and genial and catered to after-work-hours businesspeople. It still does, but on a grander scale, and I like both versions of Kieran's about equally, but the older was a short walk from my old apartment and felt like my neighborhood bar. I would often go in, and I would almost always get the whiskey tomato soup.
I have since worked with the former owner and namesake, Kieran Folliard, when he launched his own whiskey, called 2 Gingers. My girlfriend worked for a while in one of his other bars, The Local, which had a longstanding record for leading the world in the amount of Jameson it served. And yet I have not been able to get the recipe for whiskey tomato soup from Kieran.
I can't be sure, but I think the soup was introduced there. It's not indigenous to Ireland, unless the Irish have been especially secretive about this food. The oldest reference I can locate to this peculiar combination of liquor and soup is from March 15, 2010, and, son of a gun, I wrote it:
"Let it be noted, however, that sometimes authenticity isn't always desirable," I wrote. "For instance, we have a number of Irish pubs in the Twin Cities, but most don't serve authentic Irish pub fare. You're not able, for instance, to order KP Meanies, which is a pickled onion-flavored corn snack. Most don't offer black pudding either, which is a sausage made from animal blood. To the best of our knowledge, nobody in town offers dulse, which is a red algae sometimes enjoyed as a snack food. Some foods just don't make the jump to the United States, so, if you're eating at, say, Kieran's, you're probably going to be having a whiskey tomato soup rather than crubeens, which are salted pig's feet."
There was a pub, Killarney House Restaurant in Davidsonville, MD, that also offered a whiskey tomato soup in 2010, but this first appears online in November of that year; maybe they read my article and got ideas.
I've scoured newspaper archives and old books, and I can find nothing that predates my 2010 article. So I'm going to go ahead and call it, barring further evidence: Whiskey tomato soup is an Irish-American innovation, began in Minneapolis at Kieran's, and I was the first person to make note of it.
Why do I like it so? I suppose it must be the whiskey, as I am not especially keen on tomato soup. But, then, the Irish make tomato soup differently than we yanks -- they make it creamy, and that's how Kieran's offered it. So maybe the creaminess had something to do with it.
Eventually I did manage to track down the original recipe, and Kieran's also used fresh tomatoes, rather than pouring their soup from a tin, and, having made it myself, it makes a difference. What results us robust and sweet, and the tomato and whiskey flavors combine as though they had been yearning for each others for years. I imagine Kieran's used Jameson, as that was the whiskey that made their reputation for a while, and certainly the soup seemed to have Jameson's mix of malt and spice.
Here's a version of the recipe: You're going to want to roast fresh plum tomatoes for about 45 minutes, and then combine it with a saute of garlic, onions, and, if you like, basil. Add to this a can of plum tomatoes, including the juice from the can, and heavy cream. At the end, dump in Jameson to taste, spooning the soup to break up the tomatoes.
The whole of it will probably take about two hours, which is terrible, just terrible. It took me 10 minutes to walk to Kieran's and five for them to serve me the soup, and that seems like it's about the outer limit of time that a person should reasonably be expected to wait for whiskey tomato soup.
