French Loaf
Put a layer of sliced tomatoes in a pudding dish, a layer of onions sliced very thin, a little pepper and salt; then spread two slices bread thick with butter, lay these on, then another layer of onions and tomatoes, and so on until your dish is full; bake from one to two hours, according to the size of the loaf. Canned tomatoes for the loaf are as good as fresh ones. The top layer should be tomatoes.
This is a layered tomato and bread casserole — a savoury bread pudding despite the name. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the two things missing are a temperature and a sense of how wet the mixture should be.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A dish of this kind will do in a moderate oven, around 350F. The recipe ties its one-to-two-hour range to "the size of the loaf"; in practice check for the onions being tender and the bread swollen with juice rather than trusting the clock.
- Pudding dishA deep ovenproof baking dish; a 2-quart casserole is the nearest modern equivalent. Depth helps, since the recipe has you build layers "until your dish is full."
- The breadA firm white loaf, slightly stale, suits this best. The recipe says only to spread the slices thick with butter; the butter is what keeps the crumb from dissolving in the tomato juice.
- Canned tomatoesThe recipe is right that canned works, but drain them well and break them up. Whole canned tomatoes in their packing liquid will flood the dish and leave you with soup and sunken bread.
- Onions"Sliced very thin" is worth taking seriously: acidic tomato slows the softening of onion, so thick slices may still have bite when the rest of the dish is done.
- Salt and moistureSalt each tomato layer as you go, as directed, but be sparing — salt draws juice out of tomatoes and adds to the liquid in the dish. Season the bread layers instead if you want more savour.
- CoveringThe recipe says nothing about covering. Baking covered for the first two-thirds and then uncovering lets the top tomato layer concentrate and brown at the edges. The text is explicit only that "the top layer should be tomatoes."
- Yield and servingA 2-quart dish gives four to six servings. Let it stand fifteen minutes out of the oven before cutting, or the layers slide apart. It sits well beside cold meat or a boiled egg.
The name is misleading to modern eyes: this "loaf" is not baked bread but a layered dish built up in a deep dish, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "loaf" freely for things of that kind — veal loaf, cheese loaf. Why it is called French is not explained in the book, and any reading of that is guesswork; what it amounts to is a buttered-bread version of scalloped tomatoes. Layered tomato-and-buttered-bread dishes turn up widely in late Victorian household cookery, a period in which commercially canned tomatoes were becoming generally available, making a tomato dish possible out of season. That the recipe pauses to say canned tomatoes are as good as fresh suggests the question was still worth answering.