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Tomato Sauce
Two ounces butter, four ounces lean, raw ham, cut into small pieces, two sliced carrots, two sliced onions, one chopped leek, two branches chopped parsley, a branch chopped celery, two cloves, one teaspoon whole peppers, one-half spring bay leaf, one-half ditto thyme, a chopped green pepper, a bean of garlic, two quarts fine, red, sound tomatoes cut into quarters (or two quarts canned), four tablespoons flour, one tablespoon salt and a light tablespoon powdered sugar.
Place all the above articles, except the flour and tomatoes, in a large saucepan; set it on a brisk fire. Mix well with a wooden spoon and let cook for twelve minutes, or until of a good brown colour, lightly mixing meanwhile. Add the flour, mix well, cook for five minutes, then add the quartered tomatoes and one quart cold water. Mix thoroughly; cover the pan and let boil very slowly for one hour and a half, mixing once in a while. Strain through a sieve into a vessel, then strain again through a cheesecloth into another vessel. Use the amount required and place the remaining tomato sauce (after having been cooled off) in bottles; cork them well and always keep in a cool place for future use. This important sauce being of such general use, and at times required only in a very small quantity, it would be advisable for convenience to prepare in larger amount than is required each time, as it will keep in perfect condition for a long time.
This is the full brigade-kitchen tomato sauce: a ham and vegetable base, a flour thickening, and a long slow simmer before it is strained twice. Nothing about the method is difficult, but two things in it need translating and one instruction should be ignored outright.
- Ignore the bottling instructionsCooked tomato sauce containing ham, onion and carrot is not acidic enough to be corked in bottles and kept at cellar temperature; that is exactly the low-acid, oxygen-free condition in which Clostridium botulinum grows, and it produces no smell or off taste to warn you. Refrigerate the surplus for a few days or freeze it in portions instead.
- Weights and vesselsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; four ounces of lean raw ham is a thick slice, diced. A "large saucepan" here means a heavy pot of at least 5 quarts, since 2 quarts of tomatoes plus a quart of water goes in.
- Brisk fireMedium-high heat. The twelve minutes is a browning stage, not a sweat: you want the ham fat rendered and the vegetables genuinely coloured, because that browning is where most of the sauce's depth comes from.
- A bean of garlicOne clove, peeled. The phrasing probably renders the French gousse. Half a "spring" looks like a printer's slip for sprig; with bay, use half a dried leaf.
- Canned tomatoesTwo quarts is roughly two 28-ounce cans with their juice. Many canned tomatoes are already salted and some are more acidic than ripe summer fruit, so it is worth adding half the tablespoon of salt at the start and correcting at the end, and keeping the sugar, which presumably offsets acidity.
- The flourFour tablespoons stirred into the fat makes a light roux and is what gives this sauce its coating body. Cook it the full five minutes before the tomatoes go in or the finished sauce tastes of raw flour. If you want a fresher, looser modern sauce, leave it out and simmer uncovered to reduce instead.
- StrainingThe sieve removes the ham, peppercorns and vegetable solids; press hard to push the tomato pulp through. The second pass through cheesecloth is for smoothness only and can be skipped unless you want a glossy sauce for coating.
- YieldThree quarts of tomatoes and water go in; some is lost to reduction and more to the strainer, so the finished quantity will be noticeably less, depending on how hard the pulp is pressed through.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American hotel and restaurant cooking was organised on French lines, and this is the French sauce tomate more or less as codified in the professional kitchens of the period: a mirepoix with raw ham or salt pork, a roux, tomatoes, long slow cooking, then a double straining. Escoffier's contemporaneous ranking of tomato sauce among the leading or "mother" sauces explains the compiler's note that it is "of such general use" and worth making in quantity, since a hotel kitchen drew on it all day for garnishes, braises and composed dishes rather than serving it plain. The advice to bottle the surplus and cork it reflects a confidence in cool storage that would sit less easily with later understandings of the risks of home preserving.