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Tomato Sauce for Chops
One-half can tomatoes, one small onion, one tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, one cup of good stock. Let it stew half an hour, strain and return to the pan and thicken with rice flour to the consistency of cream; add salt and let it boil for a short time. Pour this upon the broiled chops.
A straightforward brown tomato sauce built on stock rather than on tomatoes alone, thickened with rice flour so it stays glossy and clear rather than pasty.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod cans varied, but a common size was around 20 oz, which would make half a can roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of tomatoes with their juice. A cup of canned whole or crushed tomatoes is close enough.
- Rice flourStill sold, usually in the gluten-free or Asian grocery aisle. It thickens at a slightly higher temperature than wheat flour and gives a cleaner, less floury finish; slake about a tablespoon in cold water before stirring it in, or it will lump.
- "Consistency of cream"Thin pouring cream, not whipped. The sauce should coat a spoon and run off it freely, since it is poured over chops rather than napped on.
- Good stockThe sauce has no fat, sugar or aromatics beyond one onion, so the stock carries it. Use a real reduced brown veal, beef or game stock; a thin cube-based broth will taste of nothing but tomato and Worcestershire.
- The onionThe recipe does not say how to cut it, but since the sauce is strained there is no need to chop finely. Halving it and letting the cut faces brown in the pan first adds colour the recipe otherwise lacks.
- Boiling after thickening"Let it boil for a short time" matters: rice flour needs a minute or two at a simmer to lose its raw starch taste and reach full thickening power. Do not serve it the instant it thickens.
- YieldPerhaps 1 1/2 cups after straining; the recipe states no yield and no number of chops.
Worcestershire sauce points to a late-Victorian British-American sauce rather than anything Italian: by the 1890s the bottled sauce was a common household store-cupboard item, and cookbooks of the period reached for it where a dish needed savour without a long reduction. Tomato sauce for chops and cutlets is common in books of this era, frequently built on canned tomatoes, which by 1900 were among the cheaper and more reliable canned goods in America and were widely used in place of fresh tomatoes in winter cooking. The rice flour is the period touch most likely to surprise a modern cook; it was recommended in nineteenth-century kitchens for sauces that were to be strained and served clear, since it was believed to give a smoother, less cloudy body than wheat flour.