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Tomato Sauce II
1/2 can tomatoes 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 4 tablespoons butter 8 peppercorns 4 tablespoons flour Bit of bay leaf 1 cup Brown Stock Cook tomatoes twenty minutes with sugar, peppercorns, bay leaf, and salt; rub through a strainer, and add stock. Brown the butter, add flour, and when well browned, gradually add hot liquid.
A brown-roux tomato sauce in the classic mould — closer to an espagnole tinted with tomato than to anything Italian. The whole point is the colour of the roux, so give it the time it needs.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes came in a range of sizes in this period, so the quantity is approximate: read it as somewhere around a cup of canned tomatoes with their juice. Half a modern 14.5-oz can is a serviceable stand-in.
- Brown stockA dark beef- or veal-based stock, its colour coming from browning meat or bones before simmering. A good unsalted beef stock stands in; taste before adding the salt, since commercial stock is usually seasoned already.
- Browning the butter and flourThis is the hinge. Cook the butter and flour together over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until the roux is the colour of a hazelnut shell — several minutes. Stop short and the sauce tastes of raw flour; push too far and the butter solids burn and turn acrid.
- Adding the liquidThe tomato-stock mixture must be hot when it goes into the roux, and it should go in a little at a time, whisked smooth before the next addition. Browned flour thickens less than pale flour, so expect a sauce that coats rather than sets.
- Peppercorns and bayBoth go in whole and both come out at the straining step. Press the tomato pulp firmly through a fine sieve and discard the seeds, skins and spices.
- Simmer after thickeningThe recipe stops once the liquid is in; a few minutes at a bare simmer will take off any floury edge, and it is worth tasting for salt. A little more sugar if the tomatoes are sharp.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 to 2 cups — enough for four to six servings with braised beef, boiled tongue, croquettes or fried fish.
Brown sauces built on a roasted-bone stock and a dark roux were the backbone of the professional kitchen that American cookery schools of the late nineteenth century were busy translating for domestic cooks, and a book like this one typically offers a whole graded family of them: a white sauce, a brown sauce, and variations numbered I, II and III. What marks this version as its period is the casual half can of tomatoes. Commercially canned tomatoes became cheap and reliable in the United States in the decades after the Civil War, and by the turn of the century a cook reaching for tomato flavour in February reached for a tin without comment — a convenience that would have been remarkable to her grandmother, who had only the summer crop and whatever she had put up herself.