Tomato Sauce
Scald and peel six large ripe tomatoes; chop them up and stew slowly. Cream one tablespoonful butter, one tablespoonful sugar, one tablespoonful flour, together.
When the tomatoes are thoroughly done, and reduced to a fine pulp, add pepper and salt.
Stir the butter, sugar, and flour in. Let boil up and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A plain nineteenth-century tomato sauce thickened at the last minute with a butter-flour-sugar paste rather than a cooked roux. It works, but the sauce needs proper boiling at the end or it will taste of raw flour.
- The hinge: cook out the flourThe butter, sugar and flour go in uncooked, so the "let boil up" is not a formality. Keep it at a full simmer, stirring, for two or three minutes after the paste dissolves, or the sauce will have a pasty, chalky edge.
- Six large tomatoesRoughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb, which will cook down to somewhere around a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for about four servings alongside meat. Out of season, a 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, drained and chopped, is a closer match than pale supermarket fruit.
- Scald and peelScore an X in the base, drop into boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Worth doing, since the skins otherwise curl into hard threads in a sauce this smooth.
- "Stew slowly" and "thoroughly done"Expect 30 to 45 minutes uncovered over low heat, stirring now and then, until the pulp mounds on a spoon and no watery liquid pools at the edge of the pan. Rushing this stage is the usual cause of a thin, sharp sauce.
- The tablespoon of sugarA tablespoon to six tomatoes reads more as a balance against acidity than as real sweetening, and canned tomatoes in particular can take it. With very ripe summer fruit, start with half and taste.
- Beurre maniéCreaming raw butter with flour is the technique French kitchens call beurre manié; it thickens a finished liquid without the browned flavour of a roux. Work it smooth with a fork and add it in small pieces so it disperses rather than lumping.
- ServingA sauce of this weight would suit boiled or roast meat, croquettes, or fish, though the recipe itself says only 'serve'. It is not a pasta sauce in the modern sense -- too thick and too flour-bound.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, appeared at a moment when the tomato was long since established in American kitchens, common in cookery from the 1830s and 1840s onward. By the 1870s a Southern household book could assume ripe tomatoes in quantity and print a number of ways to use them without comment. The thickening here belongs to an older tradition than the tomato itself ⅑ the butter-and-flour paste stirred into a finished liquid is standard English and Anglo-American practice going back well into the eighteenth century, applied to a New World fruit. The attribution to "Mrs. S. T." is typical of the book, which credits contributors by initials or name throughout and reads as much like a neighbourhood exchange of receipts as an authored volume.