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Creole Sauce (Tablespoons Cottolene)
4 tablespoons Cottolene. 4 tablespoons flour. 1¼ cup green pepper cut in shreds. 1 small clove garlic. 1 truffle cut in thin shreds. 1 can small button mushrooms. 1½ cups thick, well-seasoned tomato pulp. 1/4 cups Brown Stock.
Salt, pepper and cayenne.
PROCESS: Cook pepper, onion and butter together five minutes without browning; add flour and cook two minutes, stirring constantly. Add truffle, tomato pulp and gradually Brown Stock; continue stirring until ingredients are well blended. Heat mushrooms in their own liquor, drain, and add mushrooms to sauce. Stick a tooth-pick through the clove of garlic, drop it into sauce and let it simmer fifteen minutes. Remove garlic before serving.
A brown-roux tomato sauce of the sort served over omelets, chops or fish at the turn of the last century. The ingredient list and the method disagree in two places, so read both before starting.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold by the company that issued this book. Substitute 4 tablespoons of butter, or half butter and half neutral oil; the method itself calls for butter, so the ingredient list is almost certainly advertising.
- The missing onionThe process says to cook "pepper, onion and butter" but no onion appears in the ingredients. About a quarter cup of finely chopped onion suits the other quantities here.
- Ambiguous quantities"1/2 cups" tomato pulp and "1/4 cups" Brown Stock are printed as written. The plural "cups" may indicate a dropped whole number (1 1/2 and 1 1/4); read literally as half a cup and a quarter cup, they give very little liquid for four tablespoons of roux, so add stock until the sauce is thick but spoonable.
- Do not brown the rouxThe vegetables and flour are cooked without colour and the flour only two minutes. The brown in this sauce comes from the stock and tomato, not from a dark roux.
- Tomato pulpThick, well-seasoned tomato pulp means tomatoes cooked down and sieved. Canned crushed tomatoes simmered until they mound on a spoon will do.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsThe truffle is a garnish of the period and can be left out without harming the sauce; a teaspoon of truffle oil is not a substitute in a cooked sauce. Canned button mushrooms are still sold, but drained fresh mushrooms sauteed briefly give better texture.
- The garlic on a toothpickThe clove is meant to perfume the sauce and then come out whole, so leave it uncut and make sure the pick stays visible; fish it out after the fifteen-minute simmer.
- YieldDepends on how the cup quantities are read; enough to sauce a few servings of eggs, chicken or fish.
Creole sauce in Northern cookbooks of this era is a genteel translation of New Orleans cooking: sweet pepper, onion, garlic and tomato bound with a roux, then finished with the truffle and canned button mushrooms that signalled a good table. It owes less to the long-cooked, cayenne-forward sauces of Louisiana kitchens than to the French-influenced hotel cookery that American domestic-science writers taught. The Cottolene in the ingredient list is the tell: 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening marketed hard as a cheaper, cleaner replacement for lard. Books like this one are generally said to have been given away or sold cheaply so that the brand appeared in every recipe, which would explain why the shortening heads a list whose own instructions then call for butter.