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Sauce (Cup stewed and strained)
3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 teaspoon mustard. Few grains cayenne. 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire Sauce. ¾ cup stewed and strained tomatoes Cook butter until well browned, and add remaining ingredients.
This entry has come down to us as a fragment: the ingredient list has been lost apart from its last line, leaving only the method. What survives is enough to tell you what kind of sauce it is — a brown-butter roux thinned with strained tomato — but not enough to cook from without judgement.
- "34 cup" is three-quarters of a cupThe fraction slash has dropped out in printing or scanning. Read it as 3/4 cup, roughly 180 ml, of stewed and strained tomatoes.
- "Remaining ingredients" are missingThe recipe as printed here refers back to an ingredient list that is not on the page. Sauces of this form usually run to butter, a roughly equal quantity of flour, salt and pepper, with the tomato as the liquid — but that is inference from the form of the method, not from this text or from any list we can see.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesCooked-down fresh tomatoes pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Passata or a good tomato purée is the modern stand-in; canned crushed tomato will need straining and reducing to match the thickness.
- Browning the butter is the hingeThe whole character of the sauce is in the first clause. Butter is cooked past melting until the milk solids colour and smell nutty — a few minutes over moderate heat, watched constantly, since it goes from hazelnut to burnt in under a minute. If flour is being added, it goes in at this stage and browns with it.
- Adding tomato to hot fatThe acid liquid hitting browned butter will spit. Add it off the heat or in a slow stream while whisking, then return to the heat to thicken.
- YieldWith the ingredient list missing, the yield can only be estimated: three-quarters of a cup of tomato plus whatever fat and thickening were called for would give roughly a cup of finished sauce — enough to nap two to four portions of fish or a small plate of cutlets.
Tomato sauce of this kind was understood in American kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century not as a pasta sauce but as one of the small family of brown sauces poured over broiled meat, croquettes and baked fish. The technique underneath it is the French roux, which the cooking schools of the period taught as a set of proportions to be memorised and varied — white sauce, brown sauce, and their offshoots — so that a cook could produce dozens of dishes from one drilled formula. That systematising instinct is also why entries like this one are so terse: the method assumes you already know the ratio, and the printed ingredient list was doing most of the work. When the list goes missing, as it has here, very little of the recipe is left.