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Cream Tomato Sauce
2 cups milk 6 tablespoons flour 6 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup strained tomato or 1/3 cup condensed tomato with 2/3 cup water Make a white sauce of the milk, flour and butter. Heat the strained, stewed tomato, and add gradually to the white sauce. Add the salt, and serve at once.
A thick béchamel let down with hot tomato purée. The proportions are heavier than most modern white sauces, so expect something close to a coating sauce rather than a pouring one.
- Ratio and consistencySix tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of milk is about half again the usual modern medium white-sauce ratio, giving a very stiff base. It loosens once the cup of tomato goes in, but if you want a pouring sauce, cut butter and flour to three tablespoons each.
- "Strained tomato"This means fresh tomatoes stewed and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds — about 1 lb of ripe tomatoes for a cup. Canned tomato purée or passata is the direct substitute.
- "Condensed tomato"A period term for concentrated canned tomato. The 1-to-2 dilution the recipe calls for suggests something closer to tomato purée or condensed tomato soup than to modern paste. Modern tomato paste is far more concentrated; use about 3 tablespoons with the 2/3 cup water rather than a full 1/3 cup.
- The hinge: temperature and timingHeat the tomato separately and add it warm, gradually, off a hard boil. Cold or fast-added acid can curdle the milk sauce, and the recipe's "serve at once" suggests the mixture was not meant to be held on the heat afterward.
- Cook out the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together two or three minutes before the milk goes in, or the finished sauce tastes pasty. The tomato masks less than you would think.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for about three cups of sauce; taste at the end, bearing in mind that butter of this period was commonly salted. A grating of nutmeg or a pinch of sugar to offset sharp tomato is traditional and unobtrusive.
- YieldAbout 3 cups — enough to sauce a pound of pasta, a dish of baked eggs, or six portions of vegetables or croquettes.
Cream tomato sauce sits at the junction of two nineteenth-century sauce traditions: the French white sauce that ran through American cookbooks as "cream sauce," and the tomato, which took most of the 1800s to move from suspicion to staple in the English-speaking kitchen. Meatless cookery of this period leaned hard on such sauces because they did the work that meat gravy did elsewhere — carrying flavor and fat over eggs, rice, macaroni, and boiled vegetables in households observing Lent, Friday abstinence, vegetarian principle, or the wartime meat conservation urged in the United States around 1917-18, when this sort of book proliferated. The reliance on canned "condensed tomato" is itself a marker of the era: commercial tomato canning had become cheap and ubiquitous, and cookbook writers appear to have been increasingly willing to offer the tin as an alternative to the fresh fruit.