No. 730

Puree of Tomatoes

Puree de Tomates

Cut in halves and press well, half a pound of tomatoes; fry two ounces of minced onions in two ounces of butter without browning, then add the tomatoes, and cook till done, drain them well on a hair sieve, press them through, and put this puree into a saucepan to heat again, stirring in three ounces of kneaded butter (No. 579). Just before serving add two ounces of fresh butter.

← No. 729 Puree of Spinach or of Chiccory Garnishings No. 731 Puree of Truffles and Puree of Truffles with →

For the Modern Kitchen

A garnish purée from Ranhofer's kitchen, meant as a component rather than a dish — a concentrated tomato paste enriched far past the point most modern cooks would stop. A few conventions need translating.

Kneaded butterNo. 579 is Ranhofer's beurre manie: raw butter worked together with flour (check that entry for his own proportion, which may or may not be equal weights). Three ounces of it against half a pound of tomatoes is a great deal of thickening by current standards. Whisk it in off the boil, in small pieces, and cook gently a few minutes so the flour loses its rawness.
The hingeThe recipe says only that the last two ounces of fresh butter go in just before serving. The usual handling is to swirl it in off the boil rather than let it boil again, which risks the butter separating out.
Press wellHalving and squeezing the tomatoes before cooking pushes out the seeds and watery gel, leaving flesh; that is much of why this cooks down to a puree rather than a thin sauce.
Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used either in a round frame or stretched in a drum. A fine-mesh conical strainer or a nylon tamis does the same work; a food mill fitted with the fine plate is faster and holds back skins and any stray seeds.
Onions without browningSweat the minced onion in butter over low heat until translucent only. Colour here reads as bitterness once the tomato is reduced around it.
Cook till doneUnhelpful as written. Reduce over moderate heat, stirring, until the pulp holds a line when a spoon is drawn through it — roughly 15 to 25 minutes depending on how wet the tomatoes were.
TomatoesRipe plum or paste tomatoes give the best return. Good canned whole tomatoes, drained hard and pressed, are a reasonable substitute out of season; skip the peeling since everything goes through the sieve.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its structure explains this entry: purées appear in a numbered run under Garnishings, alongside spinach, chicory and truffle, because in the French service Ranhofer trained in they were building blocks — bedding for a cutlet, a band piped around a platter, a base to be let down with stock into a sauce. The cross-reference to No. 579 for kneaded butter is characteristic of the book, which assumes the reader is working through it as a system rather than opening it at one page. Tomatoes are often said to have become respectable in American cooking only a generation or two earlier, and the butter-heavy treatment here shows them being handled as a French kitchen handled any vegetable purée: pressed, sieved, thickened and enriched until the raw fruit is entirely subordinate to the technique.