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Creole Sauce (Can tomato soup green pepper)
1 can tomato soup. 1 green pepper. 1/2 small onion. 1 stick celery if desired. 1 tablespoon flour. 2 tablespoons butter.
Put butter in hot spider, add onion, when brown add flour and pepper, then soup. Cook until thick. Season highly with salt and pepper. It is best to let pepper stand in boiling water ten minutes to soften before cutting fine.
A quick pan sauce built on canned soup, meant to be poured over poached or shirred eggs. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes.
- SpiderAn older name for a frying pan, originally a cast-iron one with legs for hearth cooking. By 1920 the word simply meant a heavy skillet; any 8- to 10-inch pan will do.
- The can of soupCondensed tomato soup is roughly 10-11 oz; diluted with an equal volume of water or milk it makes something over two cups, though the recipe itself says nothing about diluting. If your can is ready-to-serve, use it straight. Either way the sauce will be sweeter than a scratch tomato sauce, so the instruction to season highly is not idle.
- Blanching the pepperTen minutes in boiling water takes the raw bite out of a green bell pepper and softens it enough to mince finely. A shorter soak will usually do, and skipping it entirely just means a crunchier sauce.
- The celeryListed as optional and then never mentioned in the method. Add it minced along with the onion so it has time to soften.
- Making the rouxBrown the onion in the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute before the soup goes in, or the sauce will taste of raw flour. Add the soup gradually and whisk to avoid lumps.
- ThicknessOne tablespoon of flour to something over two cups of liquid gives a thin, pourable sauce; canned soup is already partly thickened. A few minutes at a bare simmer is enough, and it will not become a gravy.
- Yield and servingMakes something over two cups of thin sauce. The recipe gives no yield and no serving suggestion.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper audience during and just after the First World War, when the Food Administration's economy campaigns had made canned goods and stretched proteins respectable in middle-class kitchens. That context explains a sauce that opens a can rather than starting with fresh tomatoes: the point is speed and reliability, not authenticity. "Creole" here appears to be doing the work it often did in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, signalling tomato, onion and green pepper together with a firm hand on the seasoning, rather than any direct line to New Orleans cooking, where a creole sauce would more often begin with the peppers, onion and celery cooked down in fat with tomatoes and stock.