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Tomato Sauce
Stew ten tomatoes with three cloves, and pepper and salt, for fifteen minutes (some add a sliced onion and sprig of parsley), strain through a sieve, put on the stove in a saucepan in which a lump of butter the size of an egg and level table-spoon flour have been well mixed and cooked; stir all until smooth and serve. Canned tomatoes may be used as a substitute.
A plain velvet-textured tomato sauce built on a butter roux, in the style of the late nineteenth-century American kitchen. The whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes.
- The hinge: cook the roux before the tomato goes inThe butter and flour should be stirred over heat until they smell nutty and lose the raw-paste taste, a couple of minutes, before the strained tomato is added; this is what the recipe means by 'well mixed and cooked'. Skip it and the sauce can carry a chalky floury edge.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With one level tablespoon of flour that is a very butter-heavy roux, which is what gives this sauce its gloss; it will thicken less than a modern equal-weight roux.
- Ten tomatoesReckon roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb of ripe tomatoes, which after stewing and sieving yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp. One 28 oz can of whole tomatoes, juice included, is a fair substitute, as the recipe itself allows.
- Three cloves means three whole clovesNot ground. They go in whole so the sieve catches them, and three is enough to perfume the sauce without turning it medicinal.
- Straining is not optionalThe sieve removes skins, seeds, cloves, and the onion and parsley if used. Push the pulp through with a ladle or the back of a spoon; a food mill does the same job faster. Discard only the dry solids left behind.
- Fifteen minutes is for softening, not reducingThe tomatoes only need to collapse enough to pass a sieve. If the pulp comes out thin, let it reduce a few minutes after it goes into the roux rather than stewing the whole tomatoes longer, which dulls the flavour.
- SeasoningNo quantities are given. Start with 3/4 teaspoon salt and a few grinds of pepper for the full batch and correct at the end, after the sauce has thickened and concentrated.
- YieldAbout 2 cups. It reheats well and thickens as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of water.
Tomato sauce thickened with a butter-and-flour roux is often related to the French sauce tomate of professional cookery, though the best-known codification of that sauce with a roux is Escoffier's, in 1903, after this book. The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the era when the tomato had, by a much-repeated tradition that modern scholarship treats as exaggerated, finished its long shift from suspect ornamental to kitchen staple, and the closing line, that canned tomatoes may be substituted, marks the moment precisely: commercial canning had made the sauce a year-round proposition instead of a late-summer one. The sieve rather than a blender, and the whole cloves fished out by it, are the giveaways of a kitchen where sauces were smoothed by hand.