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Scalloped Tomatoes
Serve Season one quart of canned tomatoes with one and a fourth teaspoons salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, two tablespoons sugar, one-half tablespoon grated onion and a few grains cayenne. Moisten one and one-half cups of soft bread crumbs with one-half cup melted butter. Butter a deep baking dish, sprinkle with a thick layer of crumbs. Pour in tomato mixture and cover with remaining crumbs. Bake in the oven until cooked throughout and crumbs are browned.
A simple baked side dish that the original leaves half-specified: no oven temperature, no time, no yield. Here is what fills in the gaps.
- Oven and timeBake at 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the tomato mixture bubbles at the edges and the top crumbs are well browned. If the crumbs colour before the centre is hot, cover loosely with foil and continue.
- Drain the tomatoesThis is the hinge. A quart of canned tomatoes carries a great deal of liquid. Drain off most of the juice or the dish comes out soupy and the bottom layer of crumbs dissolves.
- Quart of canned tomatoesTwo 14.5-oz cans, drained, or one 28-oz can. Whole peeled tomatoes broken up with a spoon give better texture than diced, which are usually firmed with added calcium chloride and hold their shape stubbornly.
- Soft bread crumbsNot dry packaged crumbs. Tear the crumb of a day-old white loaf into coarse pieces, or pulse briefly in a processor; you want soft, irregular pieces that soak up butter, roughly 3 slices of bread for the cup and a half.
- The butterHalf a cup of melted butter to a cup and a half of crumbs is generous by current taste and will pool. Two to three tablespoons is enough to moisten the crumbs and still brown them.
- Grated onionGrate a peeled onion on the coarse side of a box grater and use the pulp with its juice. Half a tablespoon is a modest amount; a full tablespoon gives a more pronounced onion flavour if you want it.
- SugarTwo tablespoons reads as a lot by current taste; sugar was a routine seasoning with canned tomatoes in this period, whatever the reason. Start with one and taste the seasoned tomatoes before assembling.
- YieldServes about four to six as a side dish; a 1.5-quart baking dish suits the quantity.
Scalloped, or "escalloped," dishes are one of the workhorses of American cookery between the Civil War and the Second World War: a seasoned filling layered with buttered crumbs and baked until brown, applied indifferently to oysters, potatoes, corn, cabbage or tomatoes. The name is generally traced to the shell-shaped dishes such mixtures were once baked and served in, long before the pattern migrated to a plain deep casserole. That this version begins with canned tomatoes rather than fresh ones is the interesting part: commercial tomato canning was well established and cheap by the early twentieth century, so a cookbook could assume a quart tin in the pantry year round. The sugar in the seasoning is of a piece with period practice for tinned tomatoes.