Tomato Sauce
2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1 Tablespoonful Minced Onion 2 Tablespoonfuls Flour 1½ Cupfuls Sifted, Canned Tomatoes 1/2 Teaspoonful Sugar ½ Teaspoonful Salt 1/8 Teaspoonful Pepper Melt the Snowdrift in a sauce-pan, add the onion and cook it until the latter is tender. Then stir in the flour and seasonings and gradually add the tomatoes, stirring constantly. Bring to boilingpoint and cook for three minutes. Serve with fish, meat, spaghetti or macaroni, with fish or meat croquettes, with fried oysters, etc.
A straightforward roux-thickened tomato sauce from a shortening manufacturer's promotional cookbook. It comes together in under ten minutes and needs only two adjustments for a modern kitchen.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, sold in tins as a lard substitute. Any neutral shortening works; 2 tablespoons of butter or olive oil will taste better and does the same job in the roux.
- "Sifted, canned tomatoes"Sifted here means pushed through a sieve to remove seeds and skin, not shaken through a flour sifter. Use 1½ cups of tomato purée or passata, or press whole canned tomatoes through a strainer.
- Cook the roux before the liquidStir the flour into the fat and onion and let it cook a full minute before any tomato goes in. Uncooked flour is what leaves a sauce tasting pasty.
- Three minutes is short but adequateFlour-thickened sauces set almost as soon as they boil. Three minutes is enough to lose the raw starch flavor, though five to eight over low heat rounds out the canned-tomato edge.
- Salt1½ teaspoons for 1½ cups of sauce is heavy by current standards, and canned purée is often already salted. Start with half and adjust.
- YieldAbout 1½ cups, enough to sauce two servings of pasta generously or dress four portions of fish or croquettes.
This comes from a cookbook published to sell Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening that was on the market before Crisco's 1911 launch, part of a broad commercial push to replace lard and butter with cheap vegetable fat. Such books were written to prove the new product could do everything animal fat did, which is why a simple tomato sauce that any cook already knew appears here at all: the point was not the sauce but the two tablespoons at the top of the ingredient list. The serving suggestions are a fair snapshot of American middle-class dining around this period, with croquettes and fried oysters treated as everyday fare and spaghetti and macaroni listed as neutral vehicles for sauce rather than as Italian dishes in their own right.