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Tomato Cream Sauce
To one-half can of tomatoes add one stalk of celery, one slice of onion, one-half teaspoon salt, a few grains of cayenne and cook briskly twenty minutes. Rub through a strainer, add one-fourth teaspoon of soda and finally one cup of White Sauce, No. 1. Serve with baked fish or cutlets.
A simple tomato-enriched béchamel from the era when every sauce chapter opened with a numbered set of white sauces. Two details carry the whole thing: the soda and the order of combining.
- The soda is the hingeThe quarter teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough tomato acid to keep the milk in the white sauce from curdling. Stir it into the hot strained purée, let the foaming subside, and do not add more — excess soda flattens the tomato flavour and leaves a soapy edge.
- Combine off the heat, tomato into white sauceCombine gently -- The recipe itself directs the white sauce into the tomato ('finally one cup of White Sauce'); the more usual modern precaution is to add the warm puree to the white sauce gradually instead. Either way, keep the pan below a simmer once combined; boiling the finished sauce is the other reliable way to break it.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in more than one size; a No. 2 can holds roughly 2.5 cups and the larger No. 3 about a quart, so half a can is somewhere in the range of 1.25 to 1.75 cups. A modern 14.5 oz can, used whole, is in the right territory; you want about a cup of thick puree after straining.
- White Sauce No. 1In books of this kind the numbered white sauces generally run from thin to thick, so No. 1 is likely the thinner one — often something like 1 to 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk. Check the book's own White Sauce No. 1 rather than assuming.
- "Cook briskly"A hard simmer, not a rolling boil, for the full twenty minutes — the point is to reduce the tomato and soften the celery and onion enough to push through a sieve. Stir near the end; reduced tomato catches quickly.
- StrainingA fine sieve and the back of a ladle does the job the original assumes. A food mill on the finest plate is faster and keeps the seeds and celery strings out; a blender alone will not, since it purees them back into the sauce.
- SeasoningCanned tomatoes today are often salted already, so hold back some of the half teaspoon until the sauce is assembled. "A few grains of cayenne" is a small pinch, meant for warmth rather than heat.
- YieldAbout 1.5 to 2 cups, enough to dress four servings of baked fish or four cutlets. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of milk.
Numbered white sauces are the signature of the American cooking-school movement that shaped books like this one: a cook learned one base in thin, medium and thick versions, then built dozens of sauces on it by addition. Tomato cream sauce is that system working as intended — a béchamel plus a strained tomato purée, with the baking soda serving as what was often said to be a period fix for the chemistry problem of acid meeting milk. Its appearance here also marks how thoroughly canned tomatoes had entered the household kitchen; the recipe assumes a can on the shelf rather than fresh fruit in season, and treats aromatics as a stalk of celery and a slice of onion cooked in and then strained out, the plainest form of flavouring in the cooking-school idiom. Pairing it with baked fish or cutlets is conventional advice of the day, when a plain broiled or baked protein was expected to arrive under a sauce.