Home › The Principles of Cookery › TOMATO PUREE (for Veal Cutlets, Calf's Head, etc.)
TOMATO PUREE (for Veal Cutlets, Calf's Head, etc.)
Simmer the tomatoes in good gravy till soft, as in the last recipe. Take out the herbs, and rub them through a sieve. Mix an ounce of clarified butter with a tea-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste; add gradually two or three spoonfuls of thick cream and the tomato pulp. Stir the puree over the fire for a few minutes, and 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 Victorian tomato sauce, thickened with butter, flour and cream, meant to be spooned over veal cutlets or calf's head. The recipe leans on the one before it in the book, so a few quantities have to be supplied.
- What the recipe assumesIt refers back to a preceding recipe for the tomatoes and gravy, which is not reproduced here; all we know from this text is that herbs were simmered with the tomatoes and lifted out. As a working guess for five or six people, try about 2 lb of ripe tomatoes, halved, simmered in roughly a cup of well-flavoured brown stock or meat gravy with a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and a slice of onion.
- "Good gravy"Not the flour-thickened pan gravy of a modern roast dinner but a concentrated meat stock or jus. A reduced veal or beef stock is the closest equivalent; a cube dissolved in water will taste thin and salty against the cream.
- An hour is too longAn hour is longer than needed -- Whatever the reason for the long stew, ripe modern tomatoes, or a tin of good plum tomatoes drained of their thinnest juice, break down in 25 to 30 minutes. Longer than that and the fresh acidity cooks out and the colour turns brick.
- Rubbing through a sieveThe point is to remove skins and seeds. A food mill on its medium plate does this in one pass. A blender will not: it pulverises the skins and seeds into the sauce, so blend first if you like, but still pass the result through a fine sieve.
- Butter and flourAn ounce of butter is 28 g; a teaspoon of flour is about 3 g, which is a very light thickening indeed, more a beurre manié than a roux. Work them cold into a paste and whisk it into the hot purée in small pieces, then cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Spoonfuls of creamTwo or three tablespoons of double or heavy cream. Add it off the heat or at a bare tremble, and do not let the sauce boil afterwards, or the acid in the tomatoes will curdle it.
- Clarified butterProbably specified because the milk solids in ordinary butter scorch and speckle a pale sauce, though the recipe does not say. Ghee works. With so short a cooking time, plain unsalted butter is acceptable if you keep the heat low.
- Yield and servingThe stated five or six servings means five or six sauce portions; no volume is given. Serve immediately: reheating a cream-finished tomato sauce dulls it and risks splitting.
Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the late nineteenth century, treats the tomato as a sauce ingredient here rather than something to eat plain. The price given, twopence to sixpence a pound, marks it as a seasonal luxury at the top of that range. Pairing it with veal cutlets and calf's head follows French practice, where a purée de tomates was one of the standard accompaniments to pale, mild meats that needed acidity; the addition of cream and a little flour softens the sauce toward the velvety, faintly pink sauces the Victorian table preferred. The technique here, simmer with aromatics, sieve, thicken, enrich, is the basic grammar of nineteenth-century sauce-making applied to a still slightly novel vegetable.