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Stewed Tomatoes
1 can tomatoes, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 cup breadcrumbs, seasoning salt, pepper and paprika.
Empty tomatoes into double boiler, add breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, and paprika, and cook slowly for 1/2 an hour, stirring from time to time. Just before serving add Crisco and stir till melted. While the tomatoes will be ready with 1/2 hour's cooking, they are improved by cooking 1 hour, and are better still if warmed again after cooling.
A plain thickened tomato side dish from a Crisco promotional cookbook, built for the double boiler so the breadcrumbs cannot catch and scorch. Two details carry the whole thing: long slow cooking and adding the fat only at the end.
- Can sizeCanned tomatoes came in several standard sizes in this period, commonly in the 1 lb to 1 lb 3 oz range; a modern 14.5 oz can is in the same neighbourhood. Use whole peeled tomatoes and break them up, or diced; the crumbs will absorb the extra liquid either way.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated as non-hydrogenated shortening. Butter is the obvious substitute here and tastes better, but note the book exists to sell Crisco, which is why the fat appears at all.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs from stale bread, not the dry sandy commercial kind. Dry packaged crumbs will make the mixture pasty; tear up day-old bread and pulse it coarsely.
- Why the double boilerBreadcrumbs in tomato juice stick and scorch over direct heat. A double boiler cannot exceed boiling water temperature, so it holds a bare simmer unattended. A heavy saucepan on low heat works if you stir often.
- "Seasoning salt"Read as "seasoning: salt, pepper and paprika" — the list is the seasoning, not a proprietary blend. Salt generously; canned tomatoes and plain crumbs both need it.
- The full hourThe instruction to cook an hour and reheat after cooling is worth following. The long heat cooks out the tinny edge of canned tomato and lets the crumbs dissolve into the sauce rather than sitting in it.
- Fat at the endAdding the shortening just before serving leaves it melted through the dish rather than cooked into it over the long simmer.
- YieldRoughly 3 cups, enough for about four as a side dish.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced in 1911; the recipes lean heavily on Crisco throughout, which explains the slightly arbitrary two tablespoons stirred in at the last moment here. The dish itself is much older than the book: stewed canned tomatoes thickened with bread were a fixture of American cooking from the later nineteenth century, when commercially canned tomatoes — canned in small quantities from the 1840s but cheap and plentiful only in the decades after the Civil War — became one of the first reliably affordable year-round vegetables in the country. Bread as a thickener was the frugal alternative to flour or cream, and the note that the dish improves on reheating reflects a kitchen where a covered dish went back on the stove rather than into a refrigerator.