Home › The Principles of Cookery › TOMATO SAUCE (another way) (Melt in a stewpan one or two)
TOMATO SAUCE (another way) (Melt in a stewpan one or two)
Melt in a stewpan one or two dozen ripe tomatoes (before putting them into the stewpan, cut them in two, and squeeze the juice and seeds out). Then add two shallots, one onion, with a few bits of ham, a clove, a little thyme, a bay-leaf, a few leaves of mace, and when tender rub them through a tamis. Mix a few spoonfuls of good Espagnole sauce and a little salt and pepper with this puree. Boil it for twenty minutes, and serve.
A brown-sauce tomato purée in the French manner rather than an Italian-style sauce: the Espagnole is doing as much work as the fruit. Everything hinges on getting the tomatoes down to a thick pulp before the sauce goes in.
- "Melt" the tomatoesThis means cooking them down over low heat until they collapse rather than adding liquid; the recipe names no fat, though a little butter or the fat from the ham is a reasonable addition. With the seeds and juice squeezed out they will want a covered pan and a fairly long, gentle cooking to break down without scorching.
- QuantityOne or two dozen ripe tomatoes is a very wide range, perhaps 3 lb at the low end to 8 lb or more depending on size, giving a correspondingly variable amount of finished sauce. Scale the aromatics with the smaller figure; the clove and mace can dominate quickly.
- A tamisA tamis is a fine drum sieve, and the point is to remove skins and fibre. A food mill with the medium plate does the same job in a fraction of the time; a blender alone will not, since it purées the skins rather than removing them.
- Espagnole sauceThe classic brown mother sauce, brown roux with veal or beef stock and mirepoix, reduced. A few spoonfuls of good demi-glace, or well-reduced brown stock thickened slightly, gives the same effect. Without it this is simply tomato purée.
- Leaves of maceBlades of mace, the dried outer casing of nutmeg. Two or three blades are plenty; a small pinch of ground mace substitutes, but add it late as it turns bitter with long cooking.
- The bits of hamRaw or dry-cured ham, trimmings and rind included, used as seasoning and then discarded with the solids at the sieve. Prosciutto ends or a scrap of unsmoked bacon work; heavily smoked ham will read as smoke rather than savour.
- The final boilTwenty minutes at a simmer, not a hard boil, to marry the purée and the Espagnole and drive off water. Stir the base of the pan, as a thick tomato reduction catches readily.
- ServingStrain again if you want it glossy, and pass it hot with grilled or roast meat, cutlets, or poultry. The finished sauce keeps three or four days refrigerated and freezes well.
Tomato sauce arrived in the grand French repertoire as a puré corrected with brown sauce rather than as a dish in its own right, and this recipe is squarely in that tradition: Espagnole, a sauce already established in eighteenth-century French cookery and later systematised by Carême among the mother sauces, carries the seasoning while the tomato supplies acidity and body. The insistence on squeezing out juice and seeds before cooking, and on passing everything through a tamis, reflects a kitchen where smoothness was the mark of skill and where a drum sieve and a strong wrist were standard equipment. Cassell's, compiled for British households in the later Victorian decades, prints several tomato sauces side by side, from plain to this more elaborate version, at a point when fresh tomatoes were becoming common enough in Britain to be bought by the dozen.