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Mock Bisque Sauce-with Cheese
I 1b. tomatoes (3 me- 1 tablespoonfuls butdium-sized) ter cup soup celery teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls flour ½ cup scalded milk tablespoonful white I or 2 tablespoonfuls pepper dry American cheese (grated) Wash celery and tomatoes well, put on to cook with one tablespoonful of water and boil slowly fifteen minutes. Put through a strainer fine enough to hold back the seeds. Melt the butter, add the flour, pepper, and salt, and, when well blended, the tomato, of which there should be half a cup. Let boil up well, remove from heat, and slowly stir in the hot milk. Keep the sauce hot, but do not allow it to boil after adding milk. Stir into it while on the stove the grated cheese. When this is melted the sauce is ready for the table. A good sauce for macaroni or spaghetti, plain boiled rice served as a vegetable, or for rice croquettes.
A small tomato-and-cheese sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux, meant to stretch a cup or so of leftover meat, rice or pasta into a dish. The whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes.
- The hinge: no boiling after the milkOnce the scalded milk goes in, hold the pan below a simmer. Boiling an acid tomato base with milk will curdle it, and the cheese added afterward will go grainy rather than smooth.
- Quantities in the ingredient columnThe list as printed runs the two columns together and several fractions are unclear. Working from the method, the sauce needs roughly 1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons flour, ½ cup tomato pulp, ½ cup scalded milk, salt and a pinch of white pepper, and 1 to 2 tablespoons grated cheese. A full tablespoon of white pepper would be far out of proportion for a cup of sauce; treat it as a pinch.
- "Soup celery"Probably the cheaper outer ribs, leaf tops and base, sold for stockpots rather than for the table. The recipe asks for a cup, which is roughly a rib or two with their leaves. It is there for aroma and is strained out.
- Getting half a cup of pulpA pound of tomatoes yields considerably more than half a cup after straining, so reduce the strained pulp down or simply measure out what you need. Out of season, ½ cup of good passata is a fair substitute for the cooked-and-sieved fresh fruit.
- "Dry American cheese"A firm, aged factory Cheddar, dry enough to grate to a powder, rather than any soft processed cheese. Any sharp Cheddar or a dry Lancashire works.
- Scalded milkHeat to just below simmer, around 180F, when the surface shivers and bubbles form at the edge. Adding it hot keeps the roux from seizing and shortens the finishing time.
- StrainingA fine mesh sieve or a food mill on the finest plate will hold back seeds and skins. Press hard; a good deal of the yield is in the pulp clinging to the underside.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce two generous servings of macaroni or rice, or to serve with rice croquettes.
"Mock bisque" is a period name for tomato soup thickened with milk and roux, standing in for the shellfish bisque it resembles in color and body; the sauce here is the same idea reduced to a cupful and finished with cheese. Cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s returned repeatedly to the curdling that follows when tomato meets milk, and printed a range of fixes -- a pinch of soda in the tomato, adding the milk off the heat, holding the pan below a boil. This recipe takes the last of those.