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Tomato Cream Sauce
½ can tomatoes Sprig of thyme 1 stalk celery 1 slice onion Bit of bay leaf 1 cup White Sauce I 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne ¼ teaspoon soda Cook tomatoes twenty minutes with seasonings; rub through a strainer, add soda, then White Sauce. Serve with Baked Fish or Lobster Cutlets.
A thin bechamel let down with strained stewed tomato — the book's all-purpose sauce for baked fish. The whole trick is keeping the two from curdling when they meet.
- The hinge: acid meets milkThe pinch of soda neutralizes enough tomato acid to keep the milk from breaking. Use no more than the scant quarter-teaspoon called for; excess soda tastes soapy and flattens the tomato. Note that the recipe itself directs the white sauce into the strained tomato, not the reverse.
- Half a canCanned tomatoes of the period came in larger tins than today's standard, so half a can meant roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of tomatoes with their juice. One 14.5-oz can is the practical modern equivalent.
- White Sauce IThe book's own white sauce recipe, butter and flour cooked together and thinned with milk; check the proportions at that entry. Make it first and keep it warm so nothing has to be reheated hard at the end.
- Twenty minutes is rightThe long simmer is not for tenderness but to concentrate the tomato and draw out the thyme, bay, celery and onion. Cook uncovered so it reduces; a watery purée will thin the finished sauce.
- StrainingRubbing through a sieve removes skins, seeds and the aromatics, which are meant to be discarded. A food mill does the job faster; a blender does not, since it pulverizes the seeds and turns the sauce bitter.
- Seasoning orderSalt and cayenne go in with the tomatoes, but taste again after the white sauce goes in — the milk mutes both noticeably.
- YieldAbout two cups. Serve it hot but never boiling; a rolling boil will separate it despite the soda.
Sauces built on a flour-and-milk base dominate this section of Fannie Farmer's book, and this one is essentially the French sauce tomate rethought for an American household that kept milk and canned tomatoes rather than veal stock. Commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and everywhere by the 1890s, which is why a recipe in a serious cookery school text can open with "half a can" and expect no argument. The soda trick was standard household chemistry of the era, appearing in creamed tomato soups throughout the period; it is generally traced to the same practical impulse that put a pinch of soda in cooking greens, and it survives in home tomato bisque recipes to this day.