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Tomato Sauce
1 quart fresh or canned tomatoes 1 slice onion 8 cloves 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour Salt and pepper Set the tomatoes, onion and cloves on the fire and cook for twenty minutes. Brown the fat in a frying-pan, add the flour, and cook until smooth and brown, stirring constantly. Add the tomatoes.
A brown-roux tomato sauce of the old boarding-house school, meant to be ladled over fish cakes, croquettes or a plain roast. The whole thing takes about half an hour.
- The quantity of tomatoA quart is 4 cups: about 2 lb of ripe fresh tomatoes, chopped with their juice, or one 28-oz can plus a splash of water. Canned tomatoes vary in acidity, so taste before salting.
- Eight cloves is not a typoWhole cloves, not garlic. Eight is assertive by current taste; four gives the warm background note without dominating. Either way they must come out, which the original assumes rather than states.
- Strain the baseThe original never says to, but pushing the cooked tomatoes through a sieve or food mill before they meet the roux removes the cloves, the onion slice, the skins and the seeds, and gives a smoother result.
- Browning the rouxMelt the butter over medium heat, whisk in the flour, and keep it moving for four to six minutes until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter. Butter solids scorch quickly; the moment it smells sharp rather than toasted, start again.
- Adding the liquidPour the hot strained tomato into the roux in a thin stream, whisking, then simmer five minutes to cook out the raw flour. Adding it all at once is what produces lumps.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are the only listed seasonings and the sauce needs a firm hand with both. A pinch of sugar will take the edge off canned tomatoes if they are sharp.
- YieldRoughly 3 cups, depending on how far the tomatoes reduce; enough for six to eight servings as an accompanying sauce. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with stock or water on reheating.
Tomato sauce built on a browned flour-and-butter roux is the domestic-science descendant of the French sauce tomate set down in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century professional kitchens, where tomato was thickened with a roux and enriched with stock and pork. In American household cookery the pork and the stock had largely fallen away, leaving butter, flour, tomato and a few cloves. The Delineator was Butterick's pattern magazine, and its cookery pages were aimed at households cooking without staff; a plain sauce like this could serve baked fish, croquettes or a roast alike. Whole cloves appear in American tomato sauces of this kind well into the twentieth century, and they became less common as oregano and basil came to define what tomato sauce was expected to taste like.