Home › The Principles of Cookery › TOMATO STORE SAUCE (another way) (Put as many tomatoes)
TOMATO STORE SAUCE (another way) (Put as many tomatoes)
Put as many tomatoes as are agreeable into an earthen jar, set them in a slow oven, and let them bake gently until quite soft. Rub them through a fine sieve, and weigh the pulp. With every pound put an ounce of white pepper, an ounce of salt, half an ounce of cayenne, half an ounce of minced shallot or onion, and a quart of strong vinegar. Boil the whole till it is as thick as cream, let it get cool, put it into dry wide-mouthed bottles, cork closely, and store in a cool dry place. Half an ounce of garlic may be added or not to the other ingredients. Time, about four to five hours. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound.
A Victorian keeping sauce — closer to a thin, fierce ketchup than anything you would spoon over pasta. The proportions are the thing to look at hardest before you start.
- "A slow oven"Roughly 275-300F/140-150C. The tomatoes are only being softened and their juice drawn out, not roasted, so nothing should colour. An ovenproof casserole with a lid stands in for the earthen jar.
- Weigh the pulp, not the tomatoesEverything downstream is keyed to the sieved pulp, and the skins and seeds stay behind in the sieve, so weigh after sieving rather than before.
- The cayenne is the number to questionHalf an ounce per pound of pulp is on the order of two to three tablespoons of ground cayenne, a searing quantity by modern taste, and a store sauce of this kind was used a few drops at a time. The ounce each of white pepper and salt is similarly a condiment-strength dose. Scale down if you want something usable by the spoonful.
- A quart of vinegar per poundThat is two pints of liquid to a pound of pulp, which is why the boiling takes hours. Use a vinegar of at least 5% acidity; "strong vinegar" here most likely means a good sharp malt or wine vinegar rather than a weak or diluted one.
- "As thick as cream"Pouring cream, not whipped — the sauce should coat a spoon thinly and still run freely. Stir often towards the end, as the pulp catches easily once most of the vinegar has gone.
- Bottling"Dry wide-mouthed bottles" is about keeping water out of the sauce; modern practice would sterilise them as well. Note that the recipe has you cool the sauce first rather than bottling it hot. The high vinegar content is what preserves this, but a cork alone will not keep surface mould out indefinitely, so refrigerate after opening.
- Timing and yieldTiming -- The recipe gives four to five hours in total and does not say how that divides between the oven and the pan; expect most of it to go on the reduction rather than the baking.
"Store sauce" is exactly what the name says: a bottled seasoning kept in the store cupboard and used by the drop to sharpen gravies, stews and cold meat, in the same family as the mushroom, walnut and anchovy ketchups that filled Victorian larders. The word ketchup itself is generally traced to a Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce, and for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an English ketchup was far more likely to be made from mushrooms or walnuts than from tomatoes. Tomato versions became common in Britain only as the fruit moved from suspicion to abundance during the nineteenth century. What separates this from the sweet bottled ketchup that later won out is the complete absence of sugar: the balance here is salt, heat and acid, a preserving formula first and a flavouring second.