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TOMATO PUREE (for Roast Beef, Mutton, Pork, etc.)
Take a dozen ripe tomatoes, slice off the stalks and the part that adheres to them, squeeze out the pips, break the fruit into pieces, and put them into a stewpan with three or four spoonfuls of good brown gravy and a little salt and cayenne. Let them boil; put with them an onion, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, and a bay-leaf, and simmer them very gently until they are quite soft. Take out the herbs, and rub the tomatoes through a fine hair sieve. Dissolve an ounce of butter in a saucepan, and mix a tea-spoonful of flour smoothly with it. Add a spoonful or two of gravy and the tomato pulp, and stir the puree over the fire for five or six minutes. Serve very hot. Time to stew the tomatoes, about an hour. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward tomato sauce thickened with a little butter-and-flour roux, meant as a hot accompaniment to roast meat. Almost everything in it translates directly; the sieve and the gravy are the two points that need attention.
- The hinge: sieve, don't blendRubbing the cooked pulp through a fine sieve is what gives this its texture — smooth but not aerated, and free of skin. A food mill or a fine chinois does the same job; a blender will whip air into it and turn the colour pale orange.
- A dozen tomatoesVictorian tomatoes were generally smaller than modern beefsteak varieties, so a dozen might come to something in the region of 2 lb (900 g) of ripe fruit. The recipe gives no weight or finished volume; expect a modest quantity of purée once the pips are out and the pulp has been sieved.
- "Good brown gravy"This means meat gravy or a reduced brown stock, not thickened pan drippings from a packet. Well-reduced beef or veal stock is the closest equivalent; without it the sauce tastes thin and merely of tomato.
- SpoonfulsIn Victorian recipes an unqualified 'spoonful' usually means a tablespoon, which would make three or four spoonfuls roughly 45–60 ml, though the book does not say so here. The teaspoon of flour to an ounce of butter is a deliberately light roux — it is there to bind, not to stiffen.
- Squeezing out the pipsRemoving seeds and their surrounding jelly cuts both the acidity and the water content, which is why an hour's gentle stewing does not leave you with soup. Keep the lid off so the liquid reduces.
- Simmer, do not boil hardThe instruction to "simmer very gently" for an hour matters: a rolling boil scorches the sugars against the pan base and the sieved purée picks up a bitter edge.
- Cook the flour outThe final five or six minutes over the fire is the flour cooking, not just heating. Stir constantly and keep the heat low, since a tomato-heavy sauce catches easily.
- Yield and servingAbout five or six servings as a sauce, as stated. Serve in a warmed boat; it thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful more stock.
Cassell's places this among the sauces for roast meats at a moment when the tomato was still relatively new to British kitchens. By the 1870s and 80s, when Cassell's Dictionary was compiled, glasshouse cultivation and Channel imports had made tomatoes common enough for the book to quote a price range per pound, and tomato sauce had become a standard partner to mutton and pork. The method itself is thoroughly French in construction: a brief stew with an onion, parsley, thyme and bay, then a sieve and a light roux, finished as a pur",