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Tomato Sauce
1 pint of stewed tomatoes 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of flour I small onion I bay leaf 1 sprig of parsley I blade of mace Salt and pepper to taste Put the tomatoes on the fire with the onion, bay leaf, parsley, and mace, and simmer slowly for ten minutes. Melt the butter, add to it the flour, mix until smooth. Press the tomatoes through a sieve, add them to the butter and flour, stir continually until it boils, add salt and pepper, and it is ready to use.
This may be served with chops, fillet, or broiled steak.
A plain roux-thickened tomato sauce of the old school, meant to be spooned over grilled meat rather than tossed with pasta. It comes together in about twenty minutes and yields roughly a pint, enough for four servings.
- Stewed tomatoesIn this period this meant tomatoes cooked down with a little salt, either home-put-up or canned. A 14-15 oz can of whole or diced tomatoes with their juice is the closest equivalent; drain off nothing, since the pint measure includes the liquid.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, and a blade is one whole piece of it. If you only have ground mace, use a pinch and add it at the end, since ground spice will not strain out and turns muddy with long simmering.
- Fish out the aromaticsThe onion, bay, parsley and mace go in whole and are meant to be removed. Pressing through a sieve does most of that work, but check for the bay leaf and mace blade first rather than forcing them through.
- The hinge: cook the roux brieflyButter and flour mixed "until smooth" should still be cooked a minute or two over low heat before the tomatoes go in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. It should smell faintly nutty and stay pale.
- Adding hot to hotWhisk the sieved tomatoes into the roux in two or three additions rather than all at once, stirring hard. Tomato is acidic and thin, and dumping it in cold or all together is how you get lumps.
- Simmer once it thickensTen minutes of simmering with the aromatics is enough to flavour the tomatoes but not to lose their rawness entirely. After the sauce boils and thickens, give it another five minutes on low heat to smooth out the flour.
- SeasoningCanned tomatoes are usually already salted, so taste before adding any. White pepper is often suggested for sauces of this kind, though black pepper does no harm.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of liquid gives only a light body, thinner than a modern coating sauce. If it thickens as it sits, loosen it with a spoonful of hot water or stock rather than more tomato.
Tomato sauce for meat sits in a different tradition from the Italian sauces most cooks now think of first: it owes more to the French sauce tomate, whose elevation to a leading sauce is generally credited to Escoffier in the early twentieth century, and which is built on a butter-and-flour roux and strained smooth so that it pours cleanly over a chop. The aromatics heremace, bay, parsley, a blade of mace, a whole small oniona are the standard flavouring bundle of that system, and the sieve is not optional in it; a sauce with visible pulp or skin would have been considered unfinished. Its appearance in a book of hot weather dishes reflects the summer logic of such collections: tomatoes were a seasonal glut, and a sauce that could be made in twenty minutes and served with something broiled rather than roasted kept the kitchen fire small. The instruction to use "stewed tomatoes" rather than fresh is a reminder of how thoroughly canned and home-put-up tomatoes had entered American cooking by the end of the century, well before year-round fresh produce was imaginable.