Tomato soup is surprisingly challenging, Jon Freeman, largely because its success depends entirely on the quality of the tomatoes. (Fresh, ripe Romas are the best.) Do too much to a tomato soup, and it fails because it's not actually tomato soup; it's a something-else soup with tomatoes in it. But if you do too little, the taste is off unless you're very lucky. Tomatoes need salt and sometimes a touch of sugar to get the flavour right.

It's cream of tomato soup that I loathe. Even when made lovingly from scratch by a kitchen expert, its flavour often has an undernote of library paste, and the texture is awful unless you purée it perfectly and strain out every seed, which is way more work than it's worth. In restaurants, the "home-made" tomato soup never is.