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Tomato Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 1/2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/2 cup water 1 cup strained tomato juice 1 slice onion 2 cloves 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Boil together water, tomato and onion; brown the butter, add the flour and brown together; add the hot liquid gradually. Boil three minutes and strain.
A flour-thickened tomato sauce built on a browned roux, meant to be spooned over baked or boiled fish. It comes together in under fifteen minutes, and nearly all of its character depends on how far the butter and flour are taken.
- The hinge: brown, don't burnButter browned with flour gives the sauce its color and a faint nuttiness, but butter solids scorch quickly and there is no going back. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly until the roux is the shade of peanut butter, roughly three to four minutes.
- The cloves are orphanedTwo whole cloves appear in the ingredient list and are never mentioned again. They belong in the pot with the water, tomato and onion, and they are removed at the straining stage along with the onion slice.
- "Strained tomato juice" is not the bottled kindIn household cookery of this period the phrase generally meant fresh or canned tomatoes cooked briefly and pushed through a sieve, thicker than modern drinking juice. Passata, or canned tomatoes blitzed and sieved, is a reasonable substitute.
- Add the liquid hot and graduallyPouring the hot tomato mixture into the roux a little at a time, whisking between additions, is what keeps it smooth. Dumping it in at once will set lumps that straining alone will not fully rescue.
- Three minutes is enoughThe boil is there to cook out the raw flour taste and set the thickening, not to reduce the sauce. Prolonged boiling in an acidic tomato base can weaken a flour-bound sauce rather than tighten it.
- Season after strainingSalt -- The recipe lists 1/2 teaspoon salt but never says when it goes in. Canned passata and standard butter both carry salt of their own, so taste at the end and adjust.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and its recipes are built to demonstrate that the flour behaves reliably — hence a sauce whose whole structure is a measured spoonful of it. The dish itself belongs to the classical French sauce repertoire: tomato sauce was codified as one of the foundation sauces in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire of 1903, though the French version is usually enriched with stock and salt pork and simmered for an hour or more. What appears here is the American domestic-science reduction of that idea: same browned roux, same principle, but pared down to water and tomato and finished in minutes, the kind of adaptation the cooking-school movement made routine in household manuals of the period.