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Tomato Sauce II
1½ can tomatoes ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 4 tablespoons butter 8 peppercorns 4 tablespoons flour Bit of bay leaf 1 cup Brown Stock Cook tomatoes twenty minutes with sugar, peppercorns, bay leaf, and salt; rub through a strainer, and add stock. Brown the butter, add flour, and when well browned, gradually add hot liquid.
This is a brown-roux tomato sauce in the old French manner, built on beef stock rather than on tomato alone. The whole character of it comes from how far you take the butter and flour.
- "1½ can tomatoes"Commercial can sizes were not yet standardised, and estimates of a period tomato can range from about 2½ to 4 cups; read this loosely as roughly 3 to 4 cups of canned tomatoes with their juice. A 28-oz can plus a splash of a second is near enough.
- Brown StockThe book's Brown Stock is beef shin and bone browned before simmering. Any dark, unsalted beef stock works; if you use a commercial one, cut the 1½ teaspoons salt back and season at the end, since reduced stocks are already salted.
- The hinge: how dark the roux goes"Brown the butter, add flour, and when well browned" is the entire flavor of the sauce. Cook the butter over medium heat until it smells nutty and the milk solids color, then stir in the flour and keep it moving for several minutes until it is the shade of a walnut shell. Black flecks mean bitterness and a fresh start.
- Hot liquid, added graduallyThe strained tomato and stock must be hot when it goes into the roux, and it must go in a little at a time with vigorous whisking. Cold liquid into hot roux sets lumps that no straining fixes.
- Straining"Rub through a strainer" means pressing the cooked tomato through a fine sieve with a ladle or spoon, which removes seeds, skins, peppercorns and bay. A food mill does the same work faster; a blender does not, since it purees the seeds and peel back in.
- Peppercorns and bayBoth are whole aromatics meant to be caught by the sieve. Do not grind the pepper, and use a small piece of bay leaf rather than a whole one for 20 minutes of simmering.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly 3 cups of a fairly thick sauce. A brown tomato sauce of this kind would be served with boiled or baked fish, croquettes and cutlets; thin with additional stock if you want it pourable.
Tomato sauces bound with a browned roux and beef stock sit somewhere between the French sauce espagnole and the tomato sauces of later American home cooking. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book prints more than one version, and this one — the version with brown stock and a dark roux — sits in the book's sauce chapter. Canned tomatoes are what make it a year-round recipe: commercial canning had become cheap and reliable in the United States after the Civil War, and by the 1890s cookbooks called for cans as a matter of course, measuring in whole tins.