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American Sauce
Chop one fair sized peeled onion very fine, one green pepper and half a peeled clove, some garlic; season with a pinch of salt and three pinches of red pepper, together with half a wineglassful of good white wine. This should be reduced for two minutes, and add about a gill of tomato sauce, and a fair-sized peeled tomato, cut up into dice-shaped pieces. Cook for about ten minutes, and it is ready for use.
A quick pan sauce built on onion, green pepper and tomato, closer to a Creole-style sauce than anything else on the Waldorf's card. It comes together in under fifteen minutes and the measurements only need a little translating.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. That is the quantity of tomato sauce here, and it is the backbone of the finished sauce.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so half a wineglassful is about 1 fluid ounce, or 2 tablespoons of dry white wine.
- The garlic line is garbled"Half a peeled clove, some garlic" almost certainly means half a peeled clove of garlic, an amount so small it is meant to season rather than announce itself. Read it that way rather than adding a whole head.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flakes. Three pinches is genuinely hot in a sauce this size; start with two if you are unsure.
- "Tomato sauce"Not the American canned pasta sauce of today. Oscar means the classic cooked tomato base of the professional kitchen, thickened and strained. Canned tomato passata or a plain unseasoned tomato puree is the nearest thing on a shelf.
- Reduce, then buildThe two-minute reduction is the hinge. Cook the onion, pepper, garlic and wine down until the pan is nearly dry before the tomato goes in, or the sauce stays thin and tastes raw of wine.
- Fat is assumedNo butter or oil is specified anywhere in the recipe. Starting the vegetables in a little of either is a reasonable reading of such a terse professional entry; a tablespoon of butter is in keeping.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for two to four portions. The recipe itself says only that it is "ready for use" and does not name a dish.
"American sauce" in turn-of-the-century hotel cookery seems to have been a loose label rather than a fixed formula; European-trained chefs are often said to have used it for tomato-and-pepper preparations they associated with the New World, much as sauce portugaise or sauce espagnole pointed elsewhere. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's 1896 cookbook, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen, and this sauce shows how thoroughly the tomato had by then been naturalised into French technique: the method is a classic reduction, the flavourings are green pepper and cayenne. The combination is close to Creole and Spanish sauces of the same decade. The terse, fatless, quantity-light style of an entry like this is a reminder that it was transcribed from professionals who did not need to be told the obvious.