Corduroy Orange

Including instructions on preparing a pincage

The surprising thing about classically prepared tomato sauce is that it’s made with a roux. The venerable Auguste Escoffier (the generally accepted authority on classical French cooking with whom it’s impossible to argue because he’s dead) directs that a gallon of tomato sauce be started with 5 ounces of salt pork.

Once the fat is rendered from the salt pork, he would have you cook 6 ounces each of small diced carrot and onion in the fat, then add 5 ounces of flour to finish the roux before adding a bay leaf, salt, pepper, sugar, ten pounds of tomatoes, and a half gallon of stock. His variation on the recipe would permit you to use tomato puree instead of tomatoes, in which case (because the puree is thick enough on its own), you would not need to make the roux. In either case, the sauce is finished by straining it through a sieve for uniform consistency, and always contains the salt pork (for apparently a classical French tomato sauce requires the presence of meat).

I doubt many people really follow his tomato sauce instructions anymore unless they’re doing so for the purpose of cooking like Escoffier.

There are many ways to make a tomato sauce and all of them are good. The basics of it are quite simple: cook tomatoes down to mush with spices and seasonings; if you’ve included the peel of the tomato, it’s best form to strain it out (as with a food mill). What you do from there is up to you.

Most vegetables go well in a tomato sauce, assuming they aren’t overcooked. Add hard vegetables like carrots and onions toward the beginning of the process so that they have a chance to cook down enough so that they aren’t crunchy; add softer vegetables later in the process so that they don’t cook down too much and get mushy. For a general order of which vegetables go before which others, consult this handy crib sheet.

One method I often use when making a tomato sauce involves making a pincage–caramelizing tomato paste in the pan at the beginning of the process before adding the liquid. To make a pincage, start with some fat in the pan. Crosswise-cut strips of bacon (often called lardons or lardoons) make a great start if you like that sort of thing; otherwise, oil or butter will work just as well. Cook brunoise-cut root vegetables in the fat until they start to get tender (turnips are really good—in this application and in pretty much every other purpose, so long as they aren’t overcooked), then add the tomato paste. Stir it constantly with a wooden spoon. It will start to develop a fond on the bottom of the pan. Fond is good as long as it’s an attractive brown color, but when it starts to get too dark, pour in an ounce or two of water to help deglaze it so that nothing develops a bitter, burnt taste.

Continue the process until your pincage is a rich caramel color, or until you run out of time and/or get sick of stirring it, whichever comes first (though you should try to spend at least five to eight minutes on it at minimum). Once you’re done caramelizing your pincage, do a final deglazing with a couple ounces of red wine. Let the wine reduce by at least half, then add the rest of your liquid ingredients (i.e. tomatoes, either canned or fresh). The tomato paste will help to thicken your sauce; caramelizing it first will help to develop its sweet flavor.

As I type this, I realize how (albeit unwittingly) similar this process is to Escoffier’s, though it excludes flour and doesn’t ask you to strain the sauce. And it doesn’t have any sugar in it. I never put sugar in my tomato sauce and don’t understand why Escoffier would recommend that someone should. Too bad I can’t argue the point with him.

Source: The Escoffier Cook Book: A Guide to the Fine Art of Cookery. Escoffier, Auguste. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959 (20th printing).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 11:44 am and is filed under Cooking Tips, Unearthed Texts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.