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TOMATO STORE SAUCE (another way) (Take two dozen tomatoes)
Take two dozen tomatoes, and bake them in a slow oven till quite soft. Rub them through a sieve, and weigh them. Put a pint of vinegar into a saucepan with one ounce of minced shallots, half an ounce of salt, half an ounce of white pepper, and six capsicums--a small quantity of cayenne may be substituted for these. Let the vinegar boil for eight or ten minutes--it will be sufficient for two pounds of pulp. Mix the vinegar and the tomatoes together, and add the juice that flowed from the fruit in baking and the strained juice of a small lemon. Put the mixture again into the saucepan, and stir it over a gentle fire till it is as thick as cream. Turn it out, and let it get cold. Put it into dry wide-mouthed bottles, and cork these down securely. Half an ounce of bruised garlic may be added or not. Time, four to five hours.
A Victorian "store sauce" — a thick, bottled tomato condiment meant to sit in the larder for months. The cooking method is sound; the storage method is the problem.
- Why this one fails todayThe sauce is poured into corked bottles and kept at room temperature with no heat processing, no sterilised jars and no measured acidity. Tomato pulp sits right at the borderline pH where Clostridium botulinum can grow, and while the pint of vinegar helps, nothing in the recipe verifies that the finished mixture is acidic enough throughout. A cork is not an airtight seal, and the vinegar is boiled separately rather than the sauce being held at a known temperature for a known time.
- Modern tomatoes make it worseModern tomatoes are no safer -- current guidance for home-canned tomatoes calls for added acid in a measured amount, because tomato acidity varies with variety and ripeness and can sit close to the pH 4.6 line. (The often-repeated claim that post-war cultivars are markedly lower in acid than older ones is not firmly established.) Either way, a recipe written before anyone measured pH cannot be relied on for shelf stability. Use a current tested recipe for bottled tomato sauce.
- A slow ovenRoughly 250-300F in modern terms. The bake is to soften the fruit for sieving: the recipe says only 'till quite soft', and the juice that flows out during baking is added back in later rather than driven off.
- Two dozen tomatoesThe recipe gives no weight for the fruit, only that the pint of spiced vinegar 'will be sufficient for two pounds of pulp'. Two dozen tomatoes may yield rather more than that, which is exactly why the recipe tells you to weigh the sieved pulp and scale the vinegar to it.
- CapsicumsHere this means hot chilli pods, not sweet bell peppers. The cayenne substitution the text offers is the same idea in powder form.
- Shallots and garlic by weightAn ounce of minced shallots is roughly one large shallot; half an ounce of bruised garlic two or three cloves. The shallots are boiled in the vinegar rather than cooked into the pulp, which extracts flavour without leaving raw allium in the finished sauce; the recipe does not say when the optional garlic goes in.
- "Thick as cream"Pouring cream, not whipped — the sauce should coat a spoon and fall in a ribbon. Overreducing turns it into a paste that will not pour from a bottle.
- The four to five hoursThat is the whole operation, dominated by the slow bake. The recipe gives no separate time for the finishing reduction on the stove, only 'till it is as thick as cream'.
"Store sauces" were a fixture of the nineteenth-century English larder: highly seasoned, vinegar-sharp liquids bottled in quantity and spooned into gravies, hashes and made dishes all winter, in the same role that Worcestershire and mushroom ketchup filled commercially. Cassell's gives several tomato versions, this being the baked-pulp variant, and the family resemblance to modern tomato ketchup is unmistakable — reduced tomato, vinegar, shallot, pepper and chilli, the sweetening left out. Tomatoes had become steadily more common in British kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century, moving from hothouse curiosity towards everyday flavouring. The instruction to weigh the sieved pulp and match it to a fixed quantity of spiced vinegar is characteristic of the book's approach: proportion given as a ratio, so the cook can scale to whatever the garden produced.