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Escalloped Tomatoes
Drain juice from 1 can tomatoes. Brush baking dish over with Crisco, and cover bottom with tomatoes; dot with Crisco, dredge with pepper and salt, and sprinkle generously with breadcrumbs; arrange another layer of tomatoes, and crumbs, and so proceed until dish is filled. Pour over all enough of juice of tomatoes to moisten well, and then finish dish with covering of crumbs. Bake 20 minutes in moderate oven.
A simple layered gratin from a promotional cookbook, written when canned tomatoes came in one standard size and shortening was the point of the book. A few notes bring it into a modern kitchen.
- The can"1 can tomatoes" of this period was most likely a No. 2 (about 20 fl oz, roughly 2.5 cups) or a No. 3 (nearer a quart); sizes were not yet fully standardised and the recipe itself gives no clue beyond "until dish is filled". A modern 28 oz can, drained, gives a workable quantity of solids.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At 20 minutes the dish is heated through but barely coloured; if you want a browned top, run it under the broiler for a minute or two at the end.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it. Any solid or liquid fat does the job here — butter gives a better flavour, about 2 to 3 tablespoons dotted through the layers.
- Reserve the juiceDrain the tomatoes but keep the liquid. You need only enough to moisten the layers; flooding the dish leaves the crumbs soggy rather than crisp.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh — fresh crumbs collapse into the tomato. Stale bread grated or pulsed and dried briefly in a low oven holds its texture through the bake.
- Seasoning"Dredge with pepper and salt" means season each layer, not just the top. A pinch of sugar to offset the acidity of canned tomatoes appears in some recipes of the period; taste before assembling.
- YieldAbout four side-dish servings in a 1.5-quart dish. It reheats poorly once the crumbs have softened, so bake it close to serving.
Escalloped — or scalloped — dishes are one of the workhorses of nineteenth and early twentieth century American cooking: anything layered with buttered crumbs and baked qualified, from oysters to potatoes to corn. Canned tomatoes made the version here a year-round dish, and they were among the cheapest and most reliable canned goods in the American pantry. This particular recipe comes from a volume written around a single brand of vegetable shortening, and the repeated instruction to brush and dot with Crisco is advertising as much as cookery.