Sauces by Maryann Tebben

Author:Maryann Tebben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The tomato can be seen as the transitional ingredient that led from meat gravy to gravy (or sauce) for Italian pasta. The tomato belonged to the language of European cuisines ‘only after its morphological reduction into something familiar, in this case a sauce, which made it fully compatible with traditional usages, while at the same time introducing a new note of taste and color’.10 Tomatoes were used in sauce for meat centuries before tomato sauce was paired with pasta, however. The first reference to cooked tomatoes is in an Italian source, Petrus Andreas Matthiolus’s botanical guide of 1554. The earliest recipe for tomato sauce in European sources, a spicy sauce for boiled meats, appeared in Naples in 1692 in Antonio Latini’s Lo scalco alla moderna. Vincenzo Corrado’s Il cuoco galante (1773) included tomato sauces for veal, sturgeon, lobster and eggs. Similarly, the first references to tomato sauce in British and American sources in the early nineteenth century were sauces for meat (or ‘gravy’), including Richard Alsop’s recipe for ‘Tomato or Love-Apple Sauce’ (The Universal Receipt Book, 1814) and N.K.M. Lee’s four recipes for tomato sauce in The Cook’s Own Book (1832). Recipes for ‘Tomatas with Gravy’ and ‘Tomata Sauce for Cold Meat’ appeared in 1826 in The Gardener’s Magazine in London. In 1842, an article in The American Agriculturist in New York noted that tomatoes could be cooked for ‘sauce, for catsup or gravy, for meat and for pies’.11 Early American sauces with tomato tended to be vinegar-based meat sauces, similar to the British ketchups discussed in chapter Two. The transition from New World to Old World for the tomato in Mediter ranean cuisine hinged on the use of chillies.

It may seem blasphemous to label mole poblano a gravy, but it is at base a sauce for meat and it bridges the Old and New Worlds just as tomato gravy does. Mole also aligns linguistically with ‘gravy’ as a generic term that takes on specific meanings depending on ingredients and context. The term mole comes from the Nahuatl word molli, meaning sauce; by extension, guacamole is sauce from avocados, and the molcajete common in Mexican kitchens is a bowl for preparing sauce by grinding or mashing ingredients. Mole refers to a group of Mexican sauces that combine indigenous and colonial ingredients. The best known of these, mole poblano, is a spicy, complex sauce cooked with turkey, another food native to Mexico. Sometimes called the Mexican national dish, legend has it that mole was created in the late seventeenth century by Mexican nuns of the Puebla de los Angeles, who blended Old World spices and New World chillies and tomatoes with chocolate, nuts and seeds to make a new kind of sauce. The truth is murkier, since there were a limited number of Latin American cookbooks published before the nineteenth century. The inclusion of chocolate in the cooked sauce excludes it from Aztec heritage; chocolate was consumed by the Aztecs exclusively as a ceremonial drink. Historians have variously attributed the origins

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