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Tomato Sauce
Cut one dozen tomatoes in halves, squeeze out the seeds and water, put the tomatoes into a saucepan and add a bunch of herbs, salt and pepper to taste, and one breakfast cupful of water; cover the saucepan, place it over the fire and boil the contents for about three-quarters of an hour, stirring it often. Put one ounce of butter and one-half ounce of flour into a saucepan, stir well over the fire for about three minutes, remove the pan from the fire and add the pulp from the tomatoes passed through a sieve. The pulp should be added a little at a time and thoroughly stirred in. Pour over one breakfast cupful of rich broth and boil it for twenty minutes. If the sauce should be too thick, a little more broth may be added; it is then ready for use. If canned tomatoes are used, they must be mixed with the butter and flour in the same way as the tomato pulp.
A classic two-stage tomato sauce: tomatoes stewed down with aromatics, then bound with a small white roux and let down with broth. The technique is sound; only the measurements and vessels need translating.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon 8 to 10 fl oz, so a generous cup. The recipe uses two of them, one of water for the stew and one of broth for the finish.
- A dozen tomatoesReckon roughly 3 lb of ripe tomatoes as a working equivalent. Seeding and draining them, as directed, is what keeps the finished sauce from tasting thin and watery.
- A bunch of herbsAlmost certainly a bouquet garni of the usual kind: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string. The recipe does not specify. Tie it so it can be lifted out before the pulp goes through the sieve.
- The roux is the hingeButter and flour cooked three minutes gives a white roux — enough to lose the raw-flour taste without colouring. Take the pan off the heat before adding the pulp and add it in small additions, or the starch seizes into lumps that no amount of later boiling will smooth out.
- Sieve, not blenderPassing the stewed tomatoes through a sieve or food mill removes skins and any stray seeds and is what gives this sauce its texture. A blender purées the skins back in and the result is duller in colour and coarser on the tongue.
- Heat levelsThe recipe says boil, twice; in practice a steady, well-covered simmer with frequent stirring will do for the three-quarters of an hour, and the final twenty minutes reduces and thickens, so scrape the corners of the pan.
- Canned tomatoesA large can (28 oz or so, and more if you want to match the fresh quantity), drained of its packing liquid and passed through a sieve. The recipe's own note is to treat it exactly like the fresh pulp — into the roux off the heat, a little at a time.
- Broth'rich broth' would most likely have been a veal or chicken stock with body from bones. Unsalted stock is the safer choice here, since the sauce reduces twice; season at the end.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings as a sauce for meat, eggs or pasta. Keep it refrigerated and use within a few days; it thickens as it cools, so loosen with broth when reheating.
Oscar Tschirky's sauce is a standard French tomate of the period, and its shape tells you how tomatoes were regarded in professional kitchens around 1896: not as a sauce in themselves but as a flavouring to be strained, bound with roux and enriched with meat stock, in the same family as the other "small sauces" built on a thickened base. Escoffier's later codification of tomato sauce, in the Guide Culinaire of 1903, followed the same logic, usually with salt pork and a mirepoix added. The instruction to seed and drain the tomatoes first, and the alternative for canned tomatoes, both point to practical hotel concerns — commercially canned tomatoes were widely available in the United States by the 1870s, and a kitchen serving hundreds could not wait on the season.