Home › Vegetables › Tomato Toast
Tomato Toast
Run a quart of stewed ripe tomatoes through a colander, place in a porcelain stew-pan, season with butter, pepper and salt and sugar to taste; cut slices of bread thin, brown on both sides, butter and lay on a platter, and just as the bell rings for tea add a pint of good sweet cream to the stewed tomatoes, and pour them over toast.-Mrs. S. Watson.
A creamed tomato dish served over toast, of the kind that carried a light supper in the 1870s. The whole thing hinges on the last second: the cream goes in off heat, immediately before serving.
- Add the cream last, and do not boil itAdd the cream last, and do not let it boil -- acidic tomato will curdle sweet cream if the mixture is held over heat. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the burner, but the timing instruction — "just as the bell rings for tea" — reads as a practical safeguard rather than mere flourish; stirring the cream in off heat and pouring at once is the safest reading.
- A quart of stewed tomatoesAbout 4 cups, which is roughly two 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes drained of their thinnest liquid, or 3 lb of fresh ripe tomatoes stewed down. Canned are closer to the original in texture than raw fresh ones.
- "Sweet cream"Simply fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream that was a normal larder item then. Heavy or whipping cream works; a pint is 2 cups, which gives a very rich sauce — a cup is plenty for most tastes.
- Running through a colanderOne common period method of holding back skins and the coarser seeds. A food mill or coarse sieve does it faster; a blender does not, since it purees the skins back in.
- Porcelain stew-panEnameled cast iron or stainless steel. The point was to avoid bare iron or tin, which reacts with tomato acid and turns the sauce metallic and gray.
- The sugarThe recipe says "to taste," and a teaspoon or two softens the acidity of the tomatoes. Taste before adding, as canned tomatoes vary widely.
- ToastThin slices, browned dry on both sides and then buttered, hold up under the sauce better than thick soft bread. Warm the platter, or the toast cools the sauce on contact.
- YieldServes four to six as a supper dish, with two slices of toast each.
Creamed tomatoes on toast belongs to the family of American "milk toast" suppers \, bread revived with a hot liquid, eaten at the light evening meal that many households still called tea. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled and edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox from the receipts of Ohio women and published in Minneapolis, is full of such dishes because they used up bread past its best and stretched a small amount of cream into a full course. By the 1870s the tomato is generally said to have shed the suspicion it carried earlier in the century, and home canning had made stewed tomatoes something close to a year-round staple in the Midwest.