Tomato Sauce
Bit of bay leaf. 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Few grains cayenne. 1 half can tomatoes. 1/8 teaspoon soda. 1 teaspoon sugar. 4 tablespoons butter. 3 tablespoons flour. 1 cup Brown Stock. 6 peppercorns. 2 cloves.
Slice onion.
PROCESS: Heat tomatoes to boiling point; add soda and the seven ingredients following. Cook twenty minutes. Rub through a purée strainer, add stock. Brown butter in a sauce-pan, add flour and continue browning, stirring constantly. Add hot tomato mixture slowly, mix well, and pour over Macaroni.
A brown-roux tomato sauce of the sort that dressed baked macaroni in American cooking-school kitchens. The recipe reads as a list rather than a sequence, so the order of work needs sorting out before you start.
- "The seven ingredients following"The ingredient list is not in working order. After the soda goes in, add the aromatics and seasonings: sliced onion, bay leaf, peppercorns, cloves, salt, cayenne and sugar. The butter, flour and stock are held back for the roux.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned sizes of the period were not standardised, so half a can is only approximate. Something in the region of a cup and a half of canned whole or crushed tomatoes with their juice will do.
- The sodaAn eighth teaspoon of baking soda neutralises some of the tomato acid, a common move of the period when the sauce might meet milk or a butter roux. It will foam up hard for a few seconds; the recipe adds it at the boil, but you may find it easier off the heat, letting it settle before going on. It can be left out if your tomatoes are not sharp.
- Brown the roux carefullyThis is the hinge of the sauce. Butter browned and then cooked with flour until it takes colour gives the dish its flavour, but butter's milk solids scorch quickly over high heat. Keep the pan at medium, stir without stopping, and pull it when the roux smells like toasted nuts and is the colour of a copper penny.
- Purée strainerA fine-mesh sieve, food mill or chinois. Press the cooked tomatoes through and discard the skins, seeds, onion and whole spices; the peppercorns, cloves and bay were never meant to be eaten.
- Brown StockA brown beef stock, called for by name and presumably given elsewhere in the book. Any well-flavoured unsalted beef stock works. If yours is salted, hold back some of the half teaspoon of salt.
- Add the liquid hot and slowlyPouring hot tomato mixture into a hot roux in a thin stream, whisking, is what keeps it smooth. Dumping it in at once will set lumps you then have to strain out a second time.
- YieldAround two cups of fairly thick sauce; the recipe gives no yield or serving number.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when American home cooking was being taught as a system: numbered proportions, a named stock, a set of mother sauces to be varied. This tomato sauce has the flour thickening and the strained aromatics of a classical sauce tomate, but with a brown roux standing in for the salt pork and mirepoix of a professional kitchen. The pinch of soda is the period's own signature; canned tomatoes were a cheap and reliable winter staple by the 1900s but noticeably sharp, and cookery writers of the time sometimes prescribed a little soda to take the edge off, a habit that faded as canners improved their fruit and their processing. Serving it over macaroni rather than as a sauce for meat reflects a way macaroni was then understood: a starchy dish to be sauced and often baked, not yet an Italian one.