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Tomato Sauce, Mock
Put a pint of water, a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, a good pinch of salt, and a large lump of sugar into a saucepan, and let it boil. Throw into it the red part only of four large carrots, and let it boil until quite soft. Take it up with an egg-slicer, and rub it through a sieve. Put the pulp into a preserving-pan with three table-spoonfuls of ale, a quarter of a pint of vinegar, a sour apple, half a dozen shallots pared and minced finely, a pinch of salt and cayenne, and as much mustard and powdered mace as will lie on a sixpence. Stir this mixture over a gentle fire for nearly half an hour. Let it get cold, put it into bottles, and cork down securely. It will keep for three or four weeks. Or, boil a dozen sour apples, pared and cored, till tender. Rub them through a sieve, colour the pulp with turmeric, stir a little vinegar into it to give it an acid taste, and flavour with salt and cayenne.
A Victorian ketchup-style condiment built from carrot and apple in place of tomatoes. The measures are imperial and the vessels are period, but nothing here is beyond an ordinary pan and a sieve.
- The imperial measuresA pint is 20 fl oz (2½ cups), so the quarter pint of vinegar is 5 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; three table-spoonfuls of ale is a scant quarter cup. "As much as will lie on a sixpence" is a very small pinch, roughly an eighth of a teaspoon each of mustard powder and ground mace.
- "The red part only"An older carrot has a distinctly paler, woodier core. Quarter the carrots lengthwise, cut the core away and use only the deep orange outer flesh, which is what gives the sauce its tomato colour and most of its sweetness.
- VesselsAn egg-slicer here is a perforated slice or skimmer for lifting the carrots out of the boiling liquid. A preserving-pan is a wide, heavy, shallow pan; use stainless steel or enamel rather than bare copper or aluminium, since the vinegar will react.
- SievingRubbing hot carrot through a sieve with a wooden spoon works, but a food mill or a short blitz in a blender followed by a single pass through a sieve gets a smoother pulp in a fraction of the time.
- The half hour on the fireThis is where the sauce is made. Keep the heat genuinely gentle and stir often: the purée is thick and sugary and will catch and taste scorched, which no amount of vinegar covers. It is done when it mounds on the spoon and the raw shallot bite has gone.
- Sour appleA cooking apple that collapses and stays tart: Bramley, or Granny Smith if that is what is to hand. A sweet eating apple leaves the sauce cloying and flat.
- Storage, not preservingTreat this as a fresh sauce, not a shelf-stable one. The recipe's three or four weeks in corked bottles assumes a cold larder and an acidity no one measured; a sealed bottle of low-acid vegetable purée at room temperature is not a risk worth taking. Refrigerate in a clean jar and use within about a week.
- The second versionThe turmeric variant produces a yellow sauce, so it reads as mustard-adjacent rather than as tomato. It is closer to a sharp apple relish and is best judged by taste, adding vinegar a spoonful at a time.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of thick sauce, enough for a small jar. It suits chops, cold meat and fried fish rather than pasta.
"Mock" dishes run right through nineteenth-century English cookery — mock turtle, mock goose, mock cream — and they exist because a fashionable flavour was wanted when the real ingredient was out of season, expensive, or simply unfamiliar. Tomatoes were grown in Britain by the time Cassell's dictionaries were compiled, but they were a summer luxury of the walled garden and market stall, and cheap canned Italian tomatoes had not yet arrived to make tomato sauce a year-round staple. Carrot and apple, both cellar-keeping and cheap, give the sweetness, body and reddish colour that vinegar and cayenne then push toward the savoury; the ale, shallots, mustard and mace place it firmly in the older English tradition of bottled store sauces alongside mushroom and walnut ketchup. The instruction to cork it down and expect three or four weeks is a reminder of how much of a Victorian kitchen's work was aimed at bridging gaps in supply rather than at any single meal.