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Tomato and Mushroom Sauce
2 slices chopped bacon or small quantity uncooked ham 1 slice onion 6 slices carrot Bit of bay leaf 2 sprigs thyme Sprig of parsley 2 cloves ½ teaspoon peppercorns Few gratings nutmeg 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 can tomatoes ½ cups Brown Stock Salt and pepper 1½ can mushrooms Cook bacon, onion, and carrot five minutes; add bay leaf, thyme, parsley, cloves, peppercorns, nutmeg, and tomatoes, and cook five minutes. Add flour diluted with enough cold water to pour; as it thickens, dilute with stock. Cover, and cook in oven one hour. Strain, add salt and pepper to taste, and one-half can mushrooms, drained from their liquor, rinsed, and cut in quarters; then cook two minutes. Use fresh mushrooms in place of canned ones when possible.
A brown sauce in the espagnole manner, thickened with flour and simmered down in the oven rather than on the burner. The published ingredient list carries two obvious typesetting slips, both of which the method itself corrects.
- The mushroom quantityThe list reads "1½ can mushrooms" but the instructions say "one-half can." Follow the instructions: half a can of mushrooms, drained, rinsed and quartered, or a like quantity of fresh.
- The peppercorns"1½ teaspoon peppercorns" may well be a slip for ½ teaspoon, in keeping with the single onion slice and six carrot slices; a teaspoon and a half of whole pepper would be assertive in a sauce of this size.
- Oven heatFannie Farmer gives no temperature. A moderate oven, in the region of 325 to 350F, in a covered pan should hold it at a bare simmer for the hour; check that it is not boiling hard, which will scorch the flour.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod tomato cans varied in size, commonly from about 20 oz up to a quart, so half a can is somewhere in the range of 1¼ to 2 cups of tomatoes with their juice. Canned whole or crushed tomatoes work; the sauce is strained anyway, so texture is not critical.
- Brown StockThe book's own recipe, made from browned beef shin and bones. Any strong unsalted beef stock or a good veal stock will do, and the sauce is worth making only if the stock is decent.
- Diluting the flourThe instruction to slake the flour with cold water before it goes into the hot pan is what keeps the sauce from lumping, since there is barely enough bacon fat to make a proper roux. Add the flour paste off the heat, stir it smooth, then let down with stock as it thickens.
- Rinsing the mushroomsThe recipe's own direction to rinse the canned mushrooms sheds the tinny brine, and it still helps. Fresh mushrooms are better sauteed separately in a little butter before going in, or they will release water and thin the finished sauce.
- YieldAbout 2 cups after straining, enough to sauce four to six servings of beef, veal or a roast bird.
This is one of the small brown sauces of French classical cookery, filtered through an American cooking school. The structure is the one generally traced to Careme and the espagnole tradition: aromatic vegetables and bacon sweated in fat, flour, brown stock, a bouquet of herbs and whole spice, then a long slow reduction and a straining. Farmer's contribution is practicality, moving the hour-long simmer into the oven where it cannot be forgotten and stuck to the pan, and allowing canned tomatoes and canned mushrooms while noting that fresh are better. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devoted a long chapter to sauces precisely because a competent sauce repertoire was what separated a trained cook from a plain one, and the fish and meat sauce section reads as a graded course: white sauce, brown sauce, then variations like this one. The parenthetical preference for fresh reflects that fresh cultivated mushrooms were still a seasonal luxury in most American markets.