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Tomato Sauce
1 quart fresh or canned toma- 3 tablespoons butter toes
3 tablespoons flour
1 slice onion
Salt and pepper
8 cloves
Set the tomatoes, onion and cloves on the fire and cook for twenty minutes. Brown the fat in a frying-pan, add the flour, and cook until smooth and brown, stirring constantly. Add the tomatoes.
A brown-roux tomato sauce of the classic hotel-kitchen type, closer to an Espagnole than to anything Italian. The recipe is written in shorthand and leaves two steps unstated: straining, and simmering the combined sauce until it thickens.
- The quantitiesA quart of tomatoes is roughly two 14.5-oz cans with their juice, or about 2 lb of fresh tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped. "1 slice onion" means a single thick round cut across a medium onion, not a whole one.
- The clovesEight whole cloves in a quart of sauce is assertive by modern taste, and they were presumably fished out or sieved away, though the recipe does not say so. Use four to six if you want the tomato forward, and count them in so you can count them out.
- Strain before combiningThe recipe does not say to, though the slice of onion and the whole cloves suggest something was to be left behind. After the twenty-minute simmer, press the tomatoes through a sieve or food mill to remove skins, seeds, onion and cloves. Purée in a blender instead and the sauce will tend to come out paler and pulpier rather than glossy.
- The roux is the hinge"Cook until smooth and brown" means a genuine brown roux, five to eight minutes over medium heat with constant stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter. Stop short and the sauce tastes of raw flour; push too far and the flour loses thickening power and turns bitter.
- Adding the tomatoesAdd the hot strained purée to the roux a little at a time, whisking smooth between additions, or the flour will seize into lumps. Then simmer ten minutes more to cook out any remaining floury edge.
- "Brown the fat"The ingredient list says butter, the method says fat. Butter browns and can scorch at roux temperatures; watch it, or use half butter and half a neutral oil.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt and pepper go in at the end, after reduction has concentrated everything. This makes roughly 3 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside fish, croquettes or a plain roast.
Butterick's tomato sauce belongs to the American adaptation of French sauce cookery that dominated printed household advice from the 1880s through the First World War: a fat-and-flour foundation, a strained purée, and the whole thing filed among the sauces for meat and fish rather than under anything to do with pasta. Canned tomatoes are offered on equal terms with fresh, which tells you where domestic cooking had arrived -- commercial canning had been industrialised for decades, and a quart tin was a pantry staple rather than a compromise. The whole cloves are the older note in the recipe, often read as a survival of the heavily spiced sauces of the eighteenth century, and they seem to be used here as a bouquet garni would be: added for their perfume rather than eaten.