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Scalloped Tomatoes
Select nice tomatoes good ripe, slice and cover a dish with them. Have ready some grated bread crumbs, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter and a very little sugar. Place alternate layers of the tomatoes and bread crumbs, having a layer of the crumbs on top. Bake for about one hour and a half.
A plain layered gratin with no oven temperature, no quantities and a bake time set for a coal range. It works, but it needs three decisions the original leaves to you.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the sensible modern choice; at that heat the dish is done in roughly 35-45 minutes, when the top is browned and the juices have thickened at the edges.
- The hour and a halfSuch long timings often reflect a range oven whose heat was falling as the fire died. Ripe tomatoes held that long in a modern oven collapse into watery pulp and the crumbs go to paste. Judge by the surface, not the clock.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch square or 2-quart dish, about 2 lb of tomatoes (4 medium) and 1½ cups of dry crumbs, with 3 tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of sugar divided among the layers. That serves four to six as a side.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are made from dry, day-old bread rubbed on a grater, so they are coarser and drier than packaged crumbs and far drier than fresh ones. Dry your own in a low oven if you want the layers to hold their shape rather than dissolve.
- Managing the liquidSliced tomatoes shed a great deal of juice. Salting the slices and letting them drain for 15 minutes before layering, or seeding them, is the difference between a gratin and soup.
- Butter and seasoningWork the butter into the crumbs with your fingers so each layer is coated rather than sitting under a few dots. The "very little sugar" is there to balance acidity, not to sweeten; a teaspoon across the whole dish is plenty with good fruit.
- Finishing the topCover loosely with foil for the first 20 minutes if the crumbs are browning ahead of the tomatoes, then uncover to crisp. A moment under the broiler at the end does the same job.
Scalloped dishes are generally traced to the shell-shaped vessels once used for baking small portions of food in crumbs and butter, though the word is also often derived from "collop," a slice of meat; by the nineteenth century "scalloped" in American cookbooks simply meant anything layered with crumbs and baked. Tomatoes came to that treatment relatively late, and a glut of ripe fruit that would not keep was best dealt with in the oven. The pinch of sugar is characteristic of the period, when field tomatoes were sharper than most supermarket fruit today, and the dish belongs to the same household logic as bread pudding and scalloped potatoes: stale bread, a little butter, and whatever the garden gave up at once.