Soup

Nine million, 500 thousand pounds of tomatoes, each of which has of itself only a trifling odor, can in passing through the streets in one day fill a city with appetizing perfume. Chicago, as yet, hardly knows of this. Only one city in the world knows what it means to smell 9,500,000 lb. of tomatoes in one day. That city is Camden, N. J.

Last week the streets of Camden were filled with wagonloads of tomatoes. Wagon on wagon piled with red fruit filed in stately procession, all going in one direction, toward the laboratories of the Victor Talking Machine (now Audio-Vision Appliance Co., subsidiary of the Radio Corporation).

A puzzled spectator might have asked, "Are Victrolas made out of tomatoes?" Not so the laboratory workers--the tomato procession comes every year and they pay no attention. Each farmer in the crowded thoroughfare, swings his sweating horses in an arc, drives his fruity load to the receiving platform of the Campbell Soup Co. across the way from the Victor plant.

For 31 years Camden alone has been the scene of Campbell's soup harvest. But even as last week the fragrance of tomatoes drifted through Camden's streets, a new Campbell Kitchen was getting into production in Chicago. As yet the Chicago Kitchen is barely under way, but it covers 22 acres, will have eventually a capacity as great as that at Camden, not to mention the advantage of being one thousand miles nearer the millions of soup-bibbers who dwell west of the Mississippi River.

Even as one who had only seen an ordinary smithy cannot imagine the anvil chorus when the workshop of the gnomes is operating at capacity, so one who has seen an ordinary kitchen has no idea of what the operations will be in such a kitchen as that newly erected in Chicago. To get the full picture in advance, one must go to Camden, see the manicurist who inspects the fingernails of 4,000 workers, see the herds of living turtles weighing 200 or 300 Ibs. apiece brought up from the Caribbean to make a special brand of soup that retails for $2 a quart, see the 50 women who do what no machines can do (peel onions all day long), see the five soup tasters who together pass on every brew--the word of any one of whom is enough to damn a whole batch to destruction.

Campbell's soup menu lists 21 genera, species and varieties of soup: asparagus, bean, beef, bouillon, celery, chicken, chicken gumbo, clam chowder, consomme, julienne, mock turtle, mulligatawny, mutton, oxtail, pea, pepper pot, printainer, tomato, tomato-okra, vegetable, vegetable-beef. Into the making of these mighty mixtures go okra and sweet pimentoes from the South; peas, corn, lima beans from New Jersey and Delaware; red-hearted Chatanay carrots, in summer from the Finger Lakes (N. Y.), in winter from Brownsville (Tex.); yellow turnips from Nova Scotia; head rice (hard enough to stand cooking) from Patna on the Ganges River; wild Irish thyme, sweet marjoram; seasonings from Amberna and the Isles of Spice; carloads of ox-tails from the stockyards of Chicago.

All those exotic ingredients are a great joy to Campbell's president, John Thomp son Dorrance, B.S., Ph.D. No merely honorary titles conferred by hopeful universities for "benefits to soup eating mankind" are the additions to Dr. Dorrance's name. The B.S. was earned at M.I.T. The Ph.D. was won from the University of Gottingen. At 24, returning from Germany with his degrees, he decided not to take up teaching but to work for his uncle as chemist of the little Joseph Campbell Preserve Co. at Camden. He brought with him from his studies the idea of producing canned soup, ready to eat. Securing a little meat from the neighbor hood butcher, he began to experiment. The following year Campbell's tentatively offered the world five kinds of soup.

Time has rolled by -- the Campbell "Preserve Co." has been lost in a sea of soup. Dr. Dorrance became vice president, then president of the company.

Today, only 31 years after introducing the U. S. to canned soup Dr. Dorrance is 55. Proud as he may be of the business he has built at Camden and the kitchen of equal capacity that he has reared in Chicago, he can be prouder of the fragrance in Camden's air, for much of it rises from extra fine tomatoes, a variety called "J.T.D." -- John Thompson Dorrance.