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Tomato Sauce (Warm butter in a frying pan)
Warm butter in a frying pan, adding slowly the flour. To one quart of tomatoes (canned), five or six cloves with a large slice of onion. Cook about ten minutes, and as soon as flour and butter seem perfectly smooth and brown, stir in the tomatoes. Cook three minutes. Salt and pepper to suit the taste. Put this through a sieve fine enough to keep the seed from passing through. This sauce is delicious with fish and macaroni.
A brown-roux tomato sauce of the plainest sort, written with the quantities of butter and flour left entirely to the cook. A few points make it work as intended.
- The unstated rouxNo amounts are given for the butter and flour. For a quart of tomatoes, 3 tablespoons of each gives a sauce that coats a spoon without turning pasty; equal weights of butter and flour are the safe rule.
- Brown means brownThe hinge of the recipe is cooking the roux until it is smooth and brown — a good five to eight minutes over medium heat, to the colour of peanut butter. A pale roux gives a raw, floury sauce; that browning is the whole character of the thing.
- A quart of canned tomatoesTwo 14.5-oz cans, or one 28-oz can, is close enough. Whole peeled tomatoes with their juice suit this better than crushed or purée, since everything goes through a sieve at the end anyway.
- The muddled orderAs printed, the ten-minute cooking and the three-minute cooking are hard to separate. Read it as: brown the roux, add the tomatoes with the cloves and onion, then simmer. Three minutes is not enough to cook out the flour or soften the onion — give it 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer.
- Whole clovesFive or six whole cloves is assertive for a quart, and they are meant to be caught by the sieve, not eaten. Stick them into the onion slice so they are easy to account for.
- SievingA food mill fitted with the fine plate is quicker than pressing the sauce through a hand sieve, and keeps the seeds and skins behind as instructed. A blender is the wrong tool here — it purées the seeds in rather than removing them.
- YieldAbout 3 cups, enough for a pound of macaroni or for six portions of fish.
This is the standard nineteenth-century American tomato sauce: a brown roux, canned tomatoes, clove and onion, strained smooth. The technique is generally traced to French practice — Escoffier's sauce tomate works on the same principle of thickening with cooked flour — and it is often said to have entered American household books through the same channel that gave them white sauce and brown sauce. What dates it precisely is the confidence in canned tomatoes. Commercial tomato canning expanded rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and by the turn of the century a quart can was an ordinary pantry item rather than a luxury, which is why the recipe specifies canned without apology or alternative. The author's own note sends it to fish and macaroni.