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Spanish Sauce for Omelet
1 quart can tomatoes 2 tablespoons Karo 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons Mazola 2 tablespoons minced onion 3 tablespoons minced green pepper 1/2 cup minced mushrooms (optional) 1/4 cup sliced olives 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Put the Mazola in a saucepan, add the mushrooms, onion and green pepper and fry five minutes. Add the tomatoes, Karo and seasonings and simmer twenty minutes. Thicken with the cornstarch dissolved in one-fourth cup cold water. Add the olives.
A branded promotional sauce from a Corn Products Refining Company booklet — Karo, Mazola, Argo and Kingsford's are all house brands. It works as written; the notes below cover substitutions, quantities and the one step that decides the texture.
- The brand namesKaro is light corn syrup, Mazola is corn oil, and Argo and Kingsford's are both cornstarch. Any neutral oil and any cornstarch will do; for the syrup, 2 tablespoons of light corn syrup or an equal amount of sugar dissolved in the tomatoes gives the same effect.
- A quart can of tomatoesAbout 32 oz, or two standard 14.5 oz cans of whole or diced tomatoes with their juice. Crush the whole ones by hand before they go in; the sauce is meant to have body, not to be smooth.
- The cornstarch is heavy-handedThree tablespoons in a quart of sauce gives a thick, glossy, distinctly starchy body, and the booklet had cornstarch among the products it was selling. Two tablespoons, or even one, produces something closer to what a modern cook expects to spoon over an omelet.
- Slurry techniqueDissolve the cornstarch in the cold water completely before it goes near the pan, pour it in while stirring, and then bring the sauce back to a full simmer for a minute. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it boils, and undercooked it tastes chalky.
- Add the olives off the heatAdd the olives at the end -- The recipe stirs them in last, after thickening; keeping them out of the long simmer should stop their brine salting the whole sauce. Taste for salt only after they are in.
- The sweeteningTwo tablespoons of syrup in a quart of canned tomatoes was most likely meant to take the edge off acidic canned goods, though the booklet does not say so. Start with half and adjust to your tomatoes.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished sauce, enough for six to eight omelets. It keeps four or five days refrigerated, though cornstarch-thickened sauces thin and weep on reheating — warm it gently and stir.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the firm behind Karo syrup, Mazola oil, and the Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch brands. Such booklets were widely distributed in early twentieth-century America: given away free or sold for a few cents, they taught technique competently while ensuring that the pantry a reader assembled was a company pantry. "Spanish sauce" in this period was American shorthand for a tomato sauce with onion and green pepper in it, the name signalling peppers rather than any close connection to Spanish cooking, and the same label attached to Spanish rice, Spanish omelet and Spanish steak on menus of the era.