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Escaloped Tomatoes
Put in a buttered baking-dish a layer of bread or cracker-crumbs seasoned with bits of butter, then a layer of sliced tomatoes seasoned with pepper, salt, and sugar if desired, then a layer of crumbs, and so on till dish is full, finishing with the crumbs. Bake from three-quarters of an hour to an hour. Onions, prepared by soaking over night in hot water, dried well, sliced in nearly half-inch slices, and browned on both sides in a frying-pan with butter, may be added, a layer on each layer of tomatoes.
A layered tomato gratin with no oven temperature, no pan size and no yield given, which is typical of the book. The judgment calls are all about moisture.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, taken today as about 350F, suits the stated three-quarters of an hour to an hour for a dish two to three inches deep; the top crumbs should be well browned and the edges bubbling.
- Drain the tomatoesThis is the hinge. Fresh sliced tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid, and undrained they turn the lower crumb layers to paste. Salt the slices and let them sit in a colander for twenty minutes, or use canned whole tomatoes drained hard and torn open.
- EscalopedAn older spelling of scalloped, here meaning layered with crumbs and baked rather than cut in scallops. The word is generally traced back to the scallop shell dishes were once baked or served in.
- CrumbsDry bread crumbs or crushed soda crackers both work, but they behave differently: crackers are saltier and hold their texture better against the tomato juice. Reduce added salt if using crackers.
- Butter quantity"Bits of butter" on each crumb layer means roughly a tablespoon per layer for a two-quart dish. Tossing the crumbs with melted butter beforehand distributes it more evenly than dotting.
- The onion soakingStored onions could be fiercely pungent, and an overnight soak in hot water was presumably meant to draw off some of that harshness. Modern supermarket onions should not need it; slice, dry and brown them in butter as directed.
- SugarThe optional sugar is there for underripe or acidic tomatoes. A teaspoon total is plenty; more and the dish reads as sweet rather than savoury.
- YieldA two-quart dish serves six to eight as a side. Let it settle ten minutes out of the oven so the layers hold when spooned.
Scalloped vegetables were a fixture of American household cookery through the second half of the nineteenth century, and tomatoes are often said to have come to the form late, becoming a summer staple as canning and market gardening spread. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and generally dated to 1876 or 1877, appeared under more than one imprint and was published into that shift, and its vegetable chapter reflects a farm household with more tomatoes than it could eat fresh. Layering them with buttered crumbs solved two problems at once, stretching a glut and soaking up the juice. The overnight soaking of onions is perhaps the detail that dates the recipe most clearly, suggesting a housekeeping habit from an era when the onion bin was expected to last from harvest to spring and the last of it was sharp enough to need taming.