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Cream of Tomato Sauce
Make a plain cream sauce and just before serving add a cup of hot cooked tomatoes, strained. Add a pinch of soda to the tomatoes before mixing them.
A two-line recipe that leans on the book's own basic white sauce, and on one chemical trick that is the whole point of the dish.
- The hinge: soda and curdlingAcid in tomatoes will curdle a milk-based sauce on contact, especially over heat. The pinch of baking soda neutralizes enough of that acid to let the two combine smoothly. Use a genuine pinch, no more than 1/8 teaspoon per cup of tomato, or the sauce turns soapy and flat.
- Order of operationsAdd the hot tomato to the hot cream sauce, as the recipe directs, and off the heat or at a bare simmer. The recipe specifies hot tomatoes for a reason: cold or lukewarm tomato, or hard boiling of the finished mixture, makes separation more likely.
- "Plain cream sauce"A white sauce. The standard medium proportion in books of this period is roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste. Medium thickness suits here, since the tomato will thin it.
- Cooked tomatoes, strainedHome-canned or stewed tomatoes were most likely what was meant. A cup of canned whole or crushed tomatoes, simmered a few minutes and pushed through a sieve, matches the intent. The recipe calls for straining; unstrained, the seeds and skin would make the sauce gritty.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt and white pepper in the cream sauce, and a small pinch of sugar with the tomato if it tastes sharp, bring it into balance.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups, enough for four servings over poached eggs, boiled fish, croquettes, macaroni or steamed vegetables. It does not hold well; make it at the moment of serving as the recipe insists.
Cream of tomato sauce belongs to the same early twentieth-century enthusiasm that produced cream of tomato soup, and it depends on the same small piece of household chemistry: a pinch of baking soda to keep milk and acid from separating. That trick spread widely through American cookbooks in the decades around 1900, when reliably canned tomatoes made the pairing possible year-round. The extreme brevity here is unremarkable: terse cross-referencing entries are ordinary in period sauce sections, and this page is written as a variation on a basic cream sauce rather than as a standalone recipe.