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Stewed Tomatoes
After skinning the tomatoes cut them up and put in a stewpan and cook rather slowly for a few minutes. Season with salt, pepper and butter; sugar can be added if liked, also a small bit of onion, which gives a very nice flavor. Some prefer the stewed tomatoes thickened with bread crumbs, which, when used, must be added a short while before removing from the fire.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you know what a stewed tomato should taste like. The important decisions are peeling, cooking time and how much you thicken.
- SkinningScore an X in the base and dip in boiling water for 15-30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Out of season, a 28 oz tin of whole peeled tomatoes stands in for about 2 lb fresh.
- "A few minutes" is short for a reasonRipe summer tomatoes collapse in 8-10 minutes over medium-low heat and taste fresh. Longer cooking is not wrong but it turns the dish into sauce, which is not what the book means here.
- Seasoning proportionsFor 2 lb of tomatoes, start with a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon or two of butter and a pinch of sugar. The book leaves sugar to taste; a little is most useful for offsetting acidity in underripe fruit, so taste before adding.
- The onion"A small bit" means a tablespoon or so, finely minced. Soften it in the butter first rather than dropping it in raw, or it stays sharp in so short a cooking time.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs hold their shape better than fresh. 'A short while before removing from the fire' is best read as the last two or three minutes; added early they dissolve and turn the dish pasty. A quarter cup to 2 lb of tomatoes is plenty.
- Yield2 lb of tomatoes serves four as a side dish. The tomatoes slump and give up a good deal of juice, so the finished volume is less than the raw fruit suggests.
Stewed tomatoes were a fixture of American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, once the tomato had shed what is often said to have been a reputation as suspect nightshade — a story usually overstated — and become one of the most heavily grown and canned garden crops in the country. The bread-crumb variant is the more frugal line of the dish: crumbs stretched a scant summer surplus, gave body to watery fruit, and used up stale loaf ends, and the same logic produced the baked scalloped tomatoes that appear in many books of this period. The instruction to add them at the last moment is the one piece of real technique in an otherwise bare set of directions.