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Tomato Sauce (Cup butter onion finely)
1/3 cup butter 1 onion, finely chopped ¾ teaspoon salt Few grains pepper 1 small can condensed tomato 2/3 lb. lean beef Cook first four ingredients eight minutes. Add tomato, 1 pint of water, and beef cut in small pieces, and cook one and one-half hours. Remove meat before serving. Ravioli is a national Italian dish, and the cheese and condensed tomato may be best bought of an Italian grocer.
A long-simmered meat-flavored tomato sauce meant to accompany ravioli: the beef is a flavoring agent, not part of the finished dish. Plan on roughly an hour and a half of unattended simmering.
- Condensed tomatoThis most likely means a concentrated canned tomato pulp rather than the tomato paste sold in tubes today, though the exact period product is not certain. A small (6 oz) can of tomato paste with the pint of water called for should give roughly the right strength; a can of tomato sauce with rather less added water is another workable substitute.
- The salt quantityThe salt figure has lost its fraction in the printing. Three-quarters of a teaspoon is the proportion that fits this volume of sauce; salt lightly at the start and correct at the end, since a ninety-minute reduction concentrates everything.
- 1/3 cup butterThat is a little over 5 tablespoons, a generous amount for one onion. It is doing the work of enriching the sauce as well as sweating the onion, so do not cut it down expecting the same body.
- Cook first four ingredients eight minutesOver medium-low heat, so the onion softens and turns translucent without browning. Color at this stage will push the sauce toward a darker, roasted flavor than intended.
- The beefTwo-thirds of a pound of lean beef cut small; a lean cut such as round suits the instruction. It is simmered for flavor and lifted out before the sauce is served; it will be dry and exhausted, but it is perfectly good chopped into a hash or a sandwich filling.
- Simmer, not boilKeep it at a bare bubble, partly covered. A hard boil for an hour and a half will reduce the pint of water away and scorch the tomato on the bottom of the pan.
- YieldPerhaps around two cups of finished sauce after the long reduction, though this will depend on how hard it simmers and how closely it is covered.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treated Italian cooking as something faintly foreign that had to be sourced specially, and the closing note here says as much: the cheese and the condensed tomato "may be best bought of an Italian grocer." The implication is that the Italian neighborhood shop was where a Boston housekeeper went for such things. The sauce itself appears to follow a pattern often said to be common in Italian home cooking of the period and still recognizable today, where a piece of meat is simmered in tomato to lend its flavor to the sauce and is then removed.