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Creole Sauce
Slice very finely one medium white onion, six sound, peeled shallots and two green peppers. Heat thoroughly one tablespoon oil or butter in a saucepan, add the onion, shallots and peppers and lightly brown for eight minutes, stirring well meanwhile; then add half a bean finely chopped garlic and one tablespoon flour; briskly stir; add six peeled and finely chopped red seeded tomatoes. Season with a teaspoon salt and a teaspoon sugar, adding six sliced canned mushrooms, half teaspoon chopped parsley and half teaspoon finely chopped chives; briskly stir and let cook for twenty minutes, mixing once in a while; use when required.
A straightforward tomato-and-pepper sauce built on a small amount of flour, closer to a Creole sauce piquante base than to a modern marinara. A few of the measures are loose in the original and need pinning down.
- "Half a bean" of garlicThe book's habitual phrasing; it is usually read as half a clove, though it may simply mean a piece the size of a bean. Either way it is very little garlic by current taste, and the sauce is deliberately built on onion and shallot rather than garlic.
- Green peppersUnripe bell peppers, not chilies. Two medium bells give roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups sliced. If you want the heat that later Creole cooking assumes, that comes from cayenne added separately, not from these.
- Six tomatoesSix ripe medium tomatoes are about 2 lb, yielding some 3 cups peeled and chopped. A 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, drained and chopped, substitutes cleanly out of season and is closer in body than fresh winter fruit.
- The teaspoon of sugarProbably meant to balance acidity rather than to sweeten, as is common with canned or underripe tomatoes. You can add it at the end instead and taste first — good summer tomatoes rarely need it.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms of the period were generally buttons packed in brine. Six of them, sliced, is a modest amount; a handful of fresh sliced mushrooms browned with the onions gives more, though brined ones contribute a salty note the original may be counting on.
- The eight-minute browningThe recipe asks only that the onions, shallots and peppers be lightly browned before the flour goes in, and the flour then gets a brisk stir in the fat before the tomatoes hit it — otherwise the sauce tastes of raw paste.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes; the recipe does not say at what heat or whether covered, but moderate heat and an open pan will reduce it to a thick spooning sauce. If it tightens too fast, loosen with stock or water.
- Yield and useAbout 2 1/2 to 3 cups, enough for four to six servings over fish, shrimp, eggs, or an omelette of the kind that also carried the name "Creole" on hotel menus. Consider holding back some of the teaspoon of salt until the end, since the canned mushrooms bring their own.
"Creole" on an American menu was shorthand for tomato, onion and green pepper, cooked down together — a formula loose enough that hotel kitchens applied it to eggs, chicken, shrimp and rice alike, whether or not anyone in the kitchen had been to New Orleans. The trio is generally traced to the Louisiana kitchen, where it overlaps with what is now called the Creole trinity of onion, celery and bell pepper; this version swaps in shallots and skips the celery, and its flour-thickened, mushroom-flecked finish shows the hand of French professional cooking as much as anything Gulf Coast.