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Tomato Sauce for Fish
1 pint white sauce. 1 small can strained tomatoes. 1 small grated onion. 1 stalk finely chopped celery.
Mrs. Wilson gives the components and leaves the assembly to the cook, which was normal for a sauce a reader was assumed to have made before. The order of operations is the part worth spelling out.
- The hinge: cook the aromatics first, add tomato lastSweat the grated onion and chopped celery in a little butter until soft and colourless before anything else joins them, then add the tomato and let it reduce briefly. Raw grated onion stirred into finished white sauce tastes harsh and stays crunchy.
- What the white sauce isA pint of plain white sauce; by the proportions usual at the time a medium sauce runs about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to each cup of milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste. A white sauce recipe elsewhere in the book is presumably the assumed starting point.
- "Strained tomatoes"This is smooth tomato purée with the seeds and skins sieved out − close to what a supermarket now sells as passata or tomato purée in a carton, not the concentrated paste in a tube. A small can of the period probably held somewhere around 8 ounces, roughly a cup, though can sizes were not standardised.
- Guarding against curdlingAcid tomato dropped into hot milk sauce can break it. Reduce the tomato mixture separately, then whisk it into the warm white sauce off direct heat, or temper by stirring some sauce into the tomato first.
- Seasoning is left unsaidNo salt, pepper or lemon is listed, and the sauce needs all three to work against fish. Salt to taste, a good grind of white pepper, and a squeeze of lemon at the end sharpen it considerably.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished sauce, enough for six to eight portions of baked or poached white fish. It thickens as it stands; loosen with milk or fish cooking liquor.
Mary A. Wilson's cookbook carries the marks of its moment: canned goods treated as ordinary pantry stock, sauces built from a mother recipe repeated by cross-reference rather than written out again, and a general assumption that the reader is economising. A white sauce reddened and sharpened with tomato is close to what is often called sauce aurore in French practice, though the name covers a family of sauces built variously on velouté or béchamel, and Wilson does not use it; the celery and grated onion are an American domestic touch. Tomato with fish had long been a way of giving cheap poached or baked white fish some acidity and colour, and canned strained tomatoes made that possible in any season, which is precisely why the can appears here instead of fresh fruit.