Home › Game › Tomato Sauce (Cook together one)
Tomato Sauce (Cook together one)
Cook together one tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour, add one cupful of strained tomato and one cup of celery or chicken broth. Simmer seven minutes, season and serve with chicken croquettes or veal cutlets.
A small velouté-style sauce thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and thinned with tomato and broth. It makes about a cup and a half — enough for four servings of croquettes or cutlets.
- Cook the roux properlyThe hinge is the first step: cook the butter and flour together over low heat for two to three minutes before any liquid goes in, until it smells nutty rather than pasty. Skip this and the sauce tastes of raw flour no matter how long it simmers.
- ProportionsOne tablespoon butter to two of flour is flour-heavy by modern standards and gives a thick, coating sauce. Equal parts by volume (2 tbsp each) produces a smoother result at the same thickening power.
- "Strained tomato"Fresh tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve. Canned tomato purée or passata is the direct equivalent; avoid tomato paste, which is far more concentrated, and avoid canned tomato sauce, which is already seasoned.
- Celery brothCelery, including the coarse outer stalks and leaves, simmered in water and strained; such celery waters and broths turn up in cookbooks of the period. Chicken stock is the easier option and gives more body.
- Add liquid warm, off the boilWhisk the tomato and broth in gradually with the pan off direct heat, then return it. Cold liquid dumped into hot roux is the usual cause of lumps.
- Seven minutes is the minimumThat is just long enough to cook out the starch. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, gives a cleaner flavour and lets the tomato's acidity settle.
- SeasonThe original leaves this entirely open. Salt, black pepper, and a pinch of sugar if the tomato is sharp; a strip of lemon peel or a bay leaf pulled out before serving is in keeping with the period.
Sauces built on a roux and thinned with stock run through nineteenth-century American cookery, taken largely from French practice as it was filtered through English kitchens and cooking schools. The tomato is the datable element: canned and strained tomato had become a common pantry item in the later part of the century and was treated as a routine flavouring. Here the sauce is offered for croquettes and veal cutlets, both fried and both in need of moisture. Celery broth, now nearly forgotten, appears in cookbooks of the period as a way to get savoury depth without meat, and it survives today mainly in the celery that goes into stock as one aromatic among several.