Tomato Sauce with Onion
1 pt. strained tomatoes 1 small onion chopped 12 t salt 14 t pepper 1 T butter 1 T flour 1 clove Melt butter and mix with flour and cook one minute. Add to tomatoes and seasonings. Let simmer five minutes.
A plain roux-thickened tomato sauce of the kind that sat behind croquettes, meat loaf and boiled vegetables in a church-supper kitchen. The transcription has swallowed the fraction slashes.
- The garbled fractions"12 t salt" and "14 t pepper" are 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. "1 T" is one tablespoon each of butter and flour.
- Strained tomatoesIn period American cookbooks this generally means tomatoes, fresh or canned, cooked and pressed through a sieve to remove skin and seed — closest today to passata or plain tomato purée, not paste. One pint is two cups.
- The onion and cloveThe clove -- "1 clove" here is most likely a whole spice clove, which should be fished out rather than left on a plate; the onion, being chopped, stays in the sauce.
- Cooking the rouxOne minute over low heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste without colouring it. This is a white roux, and browning it will muddy the tomato.
- Order of operationsAs written the roux goes into the tomatoes. Whisk the tomatoes in gradually rather than dumping them, or the flour will seize into lumps that five minutes of simmering will not smooth out.
- Simmering timeFive minutes cooks the starch and thickens the sauce but leaves the onion crunchy. Either mince the onion very fine, or soften it in the butter before adding the flour.
- YieldAbout two cups — enough sauce for four to six servings alongside croquettes, fish or a meat loaf. It thickens further as it cools and thins again with a spoonful of water or stock.
Community cookbooks like this one are useful precisely because they record what ordinary kitchens actually did rather than what a professional thought they should do. A butter-and-flour sauce built on canned tomatoes belongs to the era after commercial canning made tomatoes a year-round staple, and it resembles, loosely, the white-sauce proportions taught in the cooking-school movement of the late nineteenth century: fat and flour in equal measure, a pint of liquid, salt and pepper, though the quantities here are lighter than the cooking schools generally prescribed. The clove and the onion are the entire seasoning — no herbs, no sugar, and, if the "1 clove" is read as a spice rather than a clove of garlic, no garlic either — which marks it firmly as an Anglo-American sauce rather than anything Italian, despite the shared ingredient.