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Tomato Sauce
1 tablespoon parsley teaspoon salt 1 cup stock 1 cup tomato Melt butter; add onion, carrot and parsley. Cook five minutes. Strain. To butter add flour; when well blended add stock and tomato. Simmer one half hour.
Serve. 1 cup White Sauce 1 tablespoon butter
The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient column — quantities for the butter, flour, onion and carrot are missing, and the trailing "1 cup White Sauce / 1 tablespoon butter" appears to belong to the neighbouring recipe. What survives is a standard brown-roux tomato sauce of the period, and it can be reconstructed with confidence.
- The missing quantitiesThe text gives no amounts for butter, flour, onion or carrot. A workable reconstruction is about 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour for the 2 cups of liquid; a slice or two each of onion and carrot would be enough, since they are cooked only for flavour and discarded at the straining.
- What "strain" means hereThe vegetables are aromatics, not body. You melt the butter, sweat the onion, carrot and parsley five minutes, then pour the butter off through a strainer and build the roux in that flavoured butter. Nothing solid goes into the finished sauce.
- Roux colourThe recipe asks only that the flour be "well blended" with the butter before the liquid goes in; it says nothing about colour. Cooking it briefly until it loses its raw smell is a reasonable refinement.
- "1 cup tomato"This means canned tomatoes with their liquid, or fresh tomatoes stewed and pushed through a sieve. A cup of good canned crushed tomatoes is the closest equivalent.
- StockThe recipe says only "stock"; a brown veal or beef stock suits the sauce and gives it depth. Unsalted commercial stock works; if you use salted stock, hold back the teaspoon of salt until the end, since half an hour of simmering will concentrate it.
- The half hourThis is not optional. It cooks out the flour, reduces the two cups of liquid to a coating consistency, and takes the raw edge off the tomato. Stir the bottom of the pan every few minutes — a floured sauce scorches easily.
- The stray last two lines"1 cup White Sauce, 1 tablespoon butter" appear to be ingredients stranded from an adjacent recipe. Do not add them; white sauce would turn this into a different sauce entirely.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half after reduction — enough for four servings over cutlets, meatloaf, boiled beef or a vegetable such as cauliflower or braised celery.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker — one of a long line of cookbooks issued by manufacturers to put their product in domestic kitchens, though the book covers a full household repertoire and not only chocolate. This tomato sauce belongs to the simplified French system that American cooking-school teachers had absorbed by the turn of the century: a roux, a stock, an aromatic garnish cooked and discarded, and a long slow simmer, all set out in the clipped imperative that Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School had made the national style. The tomato half of the sauce reflects the other great change of the period. Commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and reliable by the 1890s, and a cup of them could be had in February as easily as in August, which is why a sauce like this could sit in a general cookbook as an everyday accompaniment rather than a summer luxury.