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Creole Sauce
2 tablespoons chopped onion 4 tablespoons green pepper, finely chopped 2 tablespoons butter 2 tomatoes 1/4 cup sliced mushrooms 6 olives, stoned 1 1/3 cups Brown Sauce Salt and pepper Sherry wine Cook onion and pepper with butter five minutes; add tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives, and cook two minutes, then add Brown Sauce. Bring to boiling-point, and add wine to taste. Serve with broiled beefsteak or fillet of beef. Boiled rice should accompany the beef, and be served on same platter.
A short brown-sauce derivative rather than the long-simmered Louisiana Creole sauce; it comes together in under fifteen minutes once the Brown Sauce is ready.
- Brown Sauce firstThe recipe assumes you already have 1 1/3 cups of Brown Sauce on hand, from a separate recipe in the book. A good reduced beef or veal stock thickened with a dark roux, or a jar of decent demi-glace let down with stock, stands in for it.
- The tomatoesTwo tomatoes means two medium fresh ones, chopped (peeling and seeding first if you prefer), giving roughly a cup. Two minutes of cooking will not break them down, so they stay in recognisable pieces.
- MushroomsA quarter cup sliced is about one large or two small mushrooms. Two minutes is barely enough to take the rawness off; sauteing them separately in a little butter until browned improves the flavour and prevents them watering the sauce.
- Stoned olives"Stoned" simply means pitted. A brined green olive is the likeliest reading; six of them, sliced or left whole, add saltiness, so taste before adding more salt.
- Sherry to tasteNo quantity is given. A tablespoon or two of dry or medium sherry is a reasonable starting point for this volume of sauce; add it at the end so the aroma survives.
- Green pepperFour tablespoons finely chopped is about half a small bell pepper. Five minutes in butter softens it without colouring; keep the heat moderate so the onion does not brown and darken the finished sauce further.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly two cups, enough for four to six portions of steak. The instruction to plate the rice alongside the beef on one platter is the only serving direction given.
Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks used "Creole" loosely for many sauces built on tomato, onion and green pepper. What sets this version apart from a Louisiana kitchen's version is its foundation: rather than a long simmer of tomatoes and stock, it is built on the book's own Brown Sauce, garnished at the last minute. That approach reflects the cooking-school tradition of teaching a few basic sauces first and deriving named variations from them by additions.