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Tomato Cream Sauce
1 tablespoon chopped celery 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon kitchen bouquet 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce ½ teaspoon lemon juice 1 cup tomatoes 1 teaspoon soda Melt butter; add celery and onion, cook five minutes; add tomatoes; cook ten minutes. Strain; add soda. To White Sauce add kitchen bouquet and Worcestershire Sauce; cook five minutes.
Combine Tomato Sauce and White Sauce; add lemon juice and serve.
A two-part sauce in the Boston school style: a tomato reduction and a white sauce, married at the last minute. The ingredient list is incomplete — butter and the white sauce itself are assumed from elsewhere in the book.
- The missing white sauceUse a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt. That is the standard proportion for a medium white sauce in cookbooks of this period.
- The missing butter"Melt butter" opens the method but appears nowhere in the list. One tablespoon is enough to sweat a tablespoon each of celery and onion.
- Go very light on the sodaA full teaspoon of baking soda in 1 cup of tomatoes is far more than needed and will foam violently, flatten the flavour and leave a soapy, metallic edge. A scant pinch — 1/8 teaspoon or less — does the job of taking the acid down so the milk will not curdle.
- Kitchen BouquetStill sold: a caramel-and-vegetable browning and seasoning liquid. A tablespoon in this quantity of sauce is assertive and will darken the whole thing to a muddy brown; a teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- Tomatoes"1 cup tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their juice, common in American cookbooks of the period, though fresh tomatoes in season would also fit. Canned crushed or whole tomatoes broken up work directly.
- Combining without curdlingThe hinge of the recipe. Add the strained, alkalized tomato to the hot white sauce off the heat, stirring, rather than the reverse, and do not let it boil afterwards. Boiling an acid tomato mixture into milk is what breaks the sauce.
- Lemon juice lastHalf a teaspoon goes in after the two sauces are joined and away from the heat — it is there for brightness, and reheating it undoes the point of the soda.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for four to six servings over cauliflower, boiled celery, croquettes or a plain roast.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — a promotional cookbook whose non-chocolate chapters read as straight Boston Cooking School practice, all standardized level spoonfuls and named foundation sauces. This one is a period compromise: an inherently unstable pairing of acid tomato and milk, held together with a dose of baking soda, a trick common in American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, though how generally cooks later turned to thickening the tomato instead is harder to document. The commercial seasonings are the other mark of the date. Both Worcestershire and Kitchen Bouquet, a caramel-based browning sauce usually said to have reached American pantries in the later nineteenth century, had become pantry staples that a cookbook could name as casually as salt, and their presence here shows how quickly bottled savour worked its way into the otherwise austere white-sauce repertoire.