Tomato Sauce
One tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one cup of strained tomato; one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper; one teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt
An ingredient list rather than a method — the book assumes any cook knows what to do with equal parts butter and flour. It is a tomato-thickened white sauce, and the proportions are sound apart from the salt.
- The method the list leaves outMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste for a minute or two over moderate heat without letting it colour, then add the tomato gradually, whisking, and simmer until it thickens and loses any raw floury taste — about five minutes. Adding the tomato all at once to a hot roux is what produces lumps.
- Cut the saltA full teaspoon of salt to one cup of liquid is roughly twice what most palates now want, especially if the sauce goes over something already seasoned. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- "Strained tomato"Cooked tomato pulp pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed — the nearest modern equivalent is passata or canned crushed tomatoes puréed and strained. Tomato juice is too thin and tomato paste far too concentrated.
- The branded ingredientsLarkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper were the company's own products, sold by mail order. Any table salt and any white pepper will do; white pepper was the conventional choice in sauces of this kind, usually said to be to avoid flecks of black.
- Acid and flourTomato acid weakens the thickening power of flour slightly, so this sauce sets a little looser than a plain white sauce of the same proportions. If you want it thicker, cook it down rather than adding more flour.
- Yield and useAbout one cup. The recipe says nothing about how to serve it; sauces of this kind were commonly poured over croquettes, cutlets, macaroni, omelets or boiled fish. It is best made shortly before serving — it forms a skin as it cools and needs a whisk and a splash of liquid to bring it back.
Recipes that name the brand of salt and pepper down to the quarter teaspoon are advertising as much as instruction: the Larkin Company of Buffalo built an enormous mail-order business in soap and household goods, distributed through neighbourhood "clubs" of housewives, and cookery pamphlets circulated as premiums that kept the product names in front of the cook at the moment she reached for them. The sauce itself is unremarkable by design — a butter-and-flour liaison thinned with sieved tomato, the tomato variant of the family of white sauces that Anglo-American cookbooks of the period drilled into beginners as the foundation of all made dishes. Tomatoes had long since shed their old reputation for unwholesomeness and were among the more reliably available canned goods, which is why a cook could be told to take "one cup of strained tomato" in any season without further comment.