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Escalloped Tomatoes
Season a quart of canned, or freshly stewed tomatoes with a tablespoonful of sugar, a teaspoonful of salt and a fourth teaspoonful of pepper. Rub a baking-dish lightly with Snowdrift. Mix one and a half cupfuls of dry bread crumbs with a fourth cupful of melted Snowdrift and put a thin layer in the bottom of the baking-dish. Add a layer of the tomatoes, then one of the crumbs, alternating in this way until all is used, making the last layer of crumbs. Bake about forty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. If desired, a little onion juice may be added to the tomato.
A plain layered gratin from a shortening manufacturer's promotional book. It needs almost no translation, but two things decide whether it comes out well: the wetness of the tomatoes and the coarseness of the crumbs.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. Use melted butter for better flavor, or any neutral solid shortening if you want the original's texture.
- Quart of tomatoesAbout two 14-15 oz cans, drained of their thinnest liquid, or two to three pounds of fresh tomatoes stewed down. Canned tomatoes today may be packed in more juice than the period product; if the mixture is soupy the crumb layers will collapse into paste.
- Dry bread crumbsNot the fine sandy commercial kind, which turns to mortar. Torn stale bread dried in the oven and crushed coarsely holds its structure through 40 minutes of baking.
- OvenThe recipe already gives 350°F alongside "moderate oven," so it needs no adjustment. Bake uncovered so the top layer browns.
- Onion juicePeriod cooks grated an onion and used the liquid pressed from it, wanting the flavor without visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion, or a small onion softened in butter first, does the same job.
- SugarThe tablespoon most likely offsets the acidity of the canned tomatoes of the day. Taste before adding it all.
- YieldFills a 1½- to 2-quart dish and serves six as a side. Let it stand ten minutes before serving so the layers set.
Escalloped is a variant form of scalloped, and in nineteenth-century American cookery it meant almost anything layered with crumbs and baked in a dish — oysters, potatoes, corn, tomatoes. This version appears in a cook book issued to sell Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening; such branded books were a standard advertising form in the 1910s and 1920s, and the ingredient named in every recipe is the point of the volume. Tomatoes were among the earliest vegetables to be commercially canned in quantity in the United States, which is why a recipe like this can open with "a quart of canned" and assume every reader has some on the shelf.