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Twelve Peppercorns (Salt One ounce of Butter)
Salt. One ounce of Butter.
Two ounces of lean Ham.
One tablespoonful of Vinegar.
Put the butter into a sauté-pan. Peel and cut up the shalots and chop up the ham; put these into the sauté-pan with the peppercorns, vinegar, salt, thyme, bayleaf, and the sliced tomatoes.
Stir this over the fire for about fifteen minutes, till it is well reduced; then rub it all through a hair-sieve; return it to the sauté-pan to re-heat, and it is ready for use.
A short reduction-style tomato sauce of the late Victorian professional kitchen. Note that the printed ingredient list has been broken across the page heading, so the tomatoes, shallots, thyme and bayleaf appear only in the method with no quantities given.
- The missing quantitiesThe original names shalots, tomatoes, thyme and a bayleaf in the method but gives no amounts. For the ounce of butter and two of ham, a reasonable working scale is about 1 lb ripe tomatoes, two shallots, a sprig of thyme and one bay leaf; the twelve peppercorns and single tablespoon of vinegar are the fixed points.
- Sauté-panSaute-pan -- In this period a saute-pan is a wide, shallow pan with straight or slightly sloping sides. Width matters here: fifteen minutes is only enough to reduce the mixture if the surface area is large, and in a deep saucepan it will reduce more slowly and may still be thin at the end of the time.
- Hair sieveA tamis of woven horsehair, worked with a wooden mushroom. A fine-mesh conical strainer pressed with a ladle does the same job, or a food mill on its finest plate. The point is to leave skins, seeds and peppercorns behind, so do not use a blender in its place.
- Lean hamHam cut in a piece and chopped, rather than sliced deli ham. The recipe does not say whether it should be smoked or unsmoked. Its salt contributes to the seasoning, and the recipe gives no measure for the salt itself, so season at the end, after reducing and sieving.
- VinegarThe kind of vinegar is not specified; a white wine vinegar suits the sauce. One tablespoonful against the butter, ham and (unspecified) tomatoes is a sharpening note rather than a pickle, and is likely to taste harsh until the mixture has reduced.
- Watch the reductionFifteen minutes over a brisk heat with frequent stirring is the hinge. Underdone it sieves into thin pink juice; left too long over high heat the ham and shallot scorch on the pan bottom and the whole sauce turns bitter.
Tomato sauce came relatively late into the French repertoire, and by the end of the nineteenth century two broad approaches existed side by side: the long-simmered, roux-thickened sauce tomate of the large kitchen, and quicker reductions like this one, built on a bed of shallot, ham and herbs and passed through a sieve. The scrap of lean ham at the base is an older habit, of a piece with the brown sauces that began with bacon or salt pork in the pan; it supplies salt, fat and a savoury backbone that raw tomatoes lack. The hair sieve, or tamis, was standard equipment in kitchens of the period, and the smooth texture of sauces of this sort depends on it: everything was forced through by hand, seeds, skins, whole spices and all. The book assumes a reader who already knows what 'ready for use' means, and does not say what to pour it over.