Tomato Sauce
1 Pint Tomatoes 1 Large Slice Onion 2 Tablespoons Butter 11/2 Tablespoons Cornstarch Salt and Pepper to Taste 29 9 Directions: Put the onion and bay leaf into the tomatoes and simmer gently twenty minutes. Rub through a strainer and add to the butter and cornstarch previously rubbed together. Stir over a moderate fire till it boils and season to taste. Cook thoroughly.
A plain cornstarch-thickened tomato sauce of the kind that turned up beside croquettes, cutlets and boiled vegetables in early twentieth-century American cooking. It comes together in half an hour and needs only a little attention at the thickening stage.
- The missing bay leafThe directions call for a bay leaf that never appears in the ingredient list. Use one dried leaf, and pull it out before straining.
- A pint of tomatoesThat is two cups. The recipe does not say whether these are fresh or canned; a standard 14.5 oz can with its juice is close to a pint and would suit. Fresh tomatoes work but will need peeling and may run thinner.
- The stray numbersThe "29 9" in the text is not a quantity; it is stray matter from the printed page. Ignore it.
- Butter and cornstarch rubbed togetherAn uncooked paste rather than a cooked roux (the classic beurre manie uses flour): work the soft butter and cornstarch smooth, then combine with the strained tomato and stir it over the heat as directed, so the starch disperses before it sets.
- Moderate fireMedium heat on a modern burner. The sauce must reach a full boil for a minute or so — cornstarch does not thicken to its full strength until it boils, and undercooked starch tastes chalky.
- Do not overcook it "Cook thoroughly" means until the starch loses its raw edge, not a long simmer. Cornstarch thins out again with prolonged boiling or hard stirring, so serve within a few minutes.
- StrainingA fine sieve and the back of a ladle gives a smoother result than a food mill, though either works. Press hard enough to get the pulp through and leave only skins and seeds behind.
- YieldRoughly a cup to a cup and a half of sauce, going by the pint of tomatoes; the recipe gives no yield. Enough for about four servings alongside a vegetable, fish or croquettes.
Sauces like this one belong to the household-cookery tradition generally traced to the American cooking schools of the 1880s and 1890s, where a small repertoire of thickened sauces — white, brown, tomato, egg — was taught as the foundation of everyday cooking. The use of cornstarch is unremarkable for the period: cornstarch is generally said to have been manufactured commercially in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and it was promoted for its clarity and gloss. The book's title tells you the audience: a "bride's cook book" was a genre of its own, aimed at young women setting up a first kitchen, and its recipes tend to be short, cheap, forgiving, and built from pantry staples. A quick tomato sauce fits that brief exactly — it has nothing to do with Italian tomato sauce and everything to do with dressing up plain boiled and fried food.