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TOMATO STORE SAUCE (another way) (Gather the tomatoes on a dry)
Gather the tomatoes on a dry day, when they are quite ripe and red. Lay them in an earthen jar, put them into a cool oven, and let them remain all night, or until they are quite soft without being broken. Skin them, and rub them through a sieve. With every pint of pulp put half an ounce of bruised shallots, a quarter of an ounce of bruised garlic, a little salt, and half a pint of chilli vinegar, or half a pint of white-wine vinegar, and a little cayenne. Boil these ingredients together until the onions are soft. Rub the whole again through a sieve, add the juice of a lemon, and boil it again for ten minutes, stirring all the time. Put it into small dry bottles, and cork and seal these securely. The juice which flows from the fruit in baking must be added to the sauce. Time, ten to twelve hours. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound.
A vinegar-heavy bottled tomato sauce of the sort Victorian kitchens kept on the sideboard rather than a fresh cooking sauce. The overnight bake is the part that does the work, and it needs the lowest heat your oven offers.
- The overnight bakeThe book gives no temperature; a "cool oven" in works of this date is generally taken to mean something in the region of 250F, and many modern ovens will not hold that steadily. Use the lowest setting, or 200F overnight if that is all you have. The aim is fruit collapsed and slumped but not scorched or reduced to leather.
- The earthen jarAny deep, heavy ovenproof dish will do — a covered casserole or a stoneware bean pot. Cover it loosely so the juice stays in the dish rather than steaming away; that juice is explicitly wanted back in the sauce.
- Weights to volumesHalf an ounce of shallots is roughly a rounded tablespoon or two chopped, a quarter ounce of garlic about two average cloves. Half a pint in a British book of this date is 10 fl oz, not the American 8, so per pint of pulp reckon on a scant cup and a quarter of vinegar (about 285 ml).
- Chilli vinegarVinegar, usually white wine, steeped with red chillies; it was commonly made at home rather than bought, and steeping times vary from recipe to recipe. The book's own alternative — plain white-wine vinegar plus cayenne — is offered in its place.
- Sieving twiceThe fruit is skinned by hand first; the first pass through the sieve removes seeds and fibre, the second breaks down the softened shallot and garlic. A food mill on the fine plate handles both passes faster than a sieve and a wooden spoon.
- The final boilTen minutes with constant stirring is not padding — the pulp is thick enough to catch and burn on the base, and scorched tomato taints the whole batch. Use a heavy pan and keep the spoon moving.
- StorageThe vinegar makes this acidic enough to keep well, but a cork and wax is not a modern seal and offers no protection against mould at the neck. Bottle it in scalded jars or bottles with proper lids and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for several months.
- YieldThe book gives none. Four pounds of ripe tomatoes should bake down to something in the region of a pint and a half of pulp, which with the vinegar it calls for makes roughly a litre and a quarter of finished sauce — enough for three or four small bottles. Treat these figures as estimates.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English "store sauce", a bottled, vinegar-sharp condiment kept in the larder to be splashed over chops, cold meat and fish, and the direct ancestor of the commercial brown and tomato sauces that displaced it. Tomatoes had only become an ordinary English kitchen ingredient in the nineteenth century — earlier books treat them as a curiosity or a hothouse luxury — and the book can quote a price of 2d. to 6d. a pound, which is why so many recipes of the period are concerned with putting up a glut. The instruction to gather on a dry day is old preserving wisdom rather than superstition: fruit picked wet carries surface water and field mould into the jar. The slow overnight bake, rather than a boil, concentrates the fruit without stewing it, and the double sieving reflects a kitchen where a smooth, pourable sauce was a mark of care.