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Tomato Sauce (Simmer gently for an hour)
Simmer gently for an hour one-half can of tomatoes, one tablespoonful of minced onion and three cloves, rub through a sieve, add a cupful of water with which a teaspoonful of corn starch is mixed, and a teaspoonful of sugar. Simmer five minutes, add a tablespoonful of butter, season to taste and pour over the cutlets.
A plain flour-free tomato sauce thickened with cornstarch, meant to be spooned over veal or pork cutlets. The one thing to get right is the finish: the butter goes in off the heat and the sauce is not boiled again, or it thins and separates.
- "One-half can of tomatoes"Can sizes were not standardized in the period, so this is genuinely ambiguous — a No. 2 can held about 20 oz, a No. 3 about 32 oz. Roughly 1 to 1½ cups of canned tomatoes with their juice gives a sauce of the right consistency.
- The clovesThree whole cloves, not ground. They perfume the hour-long simmer and are caught and discarded when the sauce goes through the sieve. Ground cloves would turn the sauce gritty and dominate it.
- SievingA food mill or a fine sieve worked with the back of a ladle is what is meant, and it removes skins and seeds. A blender or stick blender will thicken and lighten the sauce instead of straining it, which changes the character of the finished dish.
- Simmer gentlyBarely bubbling. The recipe does not say whether the pan is covered; on a modern burner an hour can reduce this quantity of tomato a good deal, so add a little water if it tightens too far before the hour is up.
- The cornstarchStir the teaspoon of starch into the cup of cold water until smooth before it meets the hot sauce, and keep stirring as it comes back to a simmer. Five minutes is enough to cook out the raw starch taste; long boiling afterward will break the thickening down.
- Sugar and seasoningThe teaspoon of sugar is there to offset the acidity of the canned tomatoes, not to sweeten. "Season to taste" means salt and pepper, added at the end once the sauce has reduced and concentrated.
- YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 cups of finished sauce; the recipe gives no serving count.
Tomato sauce arrives in American cookbooks of this sort as a sauce for meat rather than for pasta, paired here with cutlets in the same role a brown sauce or a piquant sauce would play. By 1900 canned tomatoes were cheap, reliable and available year-round, and household books leaned on them heavily; the instruction to use half a can rather than fresh fruit is a marker of how thoroughly commercial canning had reshaped everyday cooking. Cornstarch rather than a butter-and-flour roux is one option among several in period American books, many of which still thicken tomato sauce with flour; it gives a clearer, glossier sauce with no floury taste. The pinch of sugar against tomato acidity is old practical wisdom, generally traced to the variable quality of preserved tomatoes rather than to any single authority.