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Tomato Toast
Take four table-spoonfuls of tomato puree, and simmer for a few minutes with a tea-spoonful of French mustard, a little salt, a sprinkling of white sugar, a dash of vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste. An onion may be put in and removed before serving. Add a table-spoonful of chopped ham and the same of grated Parmesan cheese, and stir until hot through. Last of all add a beaten egg, and beat it well into the mixture. Serve on toast or fried bread.
A late-Victorian savoury, meant for the small course served after the sweet. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and the only real difficulty is the egg.
- The hinge: the eggPull the pan off the heat, or drop it to the lowest setting, before the beaten egg goes in, and beat continuously. The mixture should thicken to the consistency of a loose custard. Left over direct heat it will scramble into curds and weep liquid onto the toast.
- Tomato purée is not tomato pasteTomato puree is not tomato paste -- In nineteenth-century usage puree generally means cooked tomatoes passed through a sieve, roughly the thickness of a thin passata. Four tablespoons of modern concentrated paste from a tube would be overwhelming; use passata, or thin paste with about an equal volume of water.
- French mustardA smooth, mild, vinegar-based mustard of the Dijon type, not the hot yellow English powder. A teaspoon of Dijon is the right substitute; English mustard at that quantity would swamp the dish.
- The onionUse a whole peeled onion, or a thick slice, so it can be lifted out cleanly. It is there for perfume only, and a few minutes of simmering gives very little — halve it and give it the full simmering time if you want it to register.
- Salt, twiceThe recipe calls for salt and then for salt and pepper again. Between the ham and the Parmesan there is already a good deal of salt in play, so season only at the end, after the cheese has melted.
- ParmesanGrate it finely and let it melt into the warm puree before the egg goes in. Coarsely grated cheese added late will clump rather than bind.
- The toastCut small — fingers or rounds. Fried bread holds up better, since the mixture is wet enough to soften plain toast within a minute or two. Assemble at the table if you can.
- YieldAbout enough for four small savoury toasts, or two as a light supper dish. It does not reheat; the egg tightens and separates.
The savoury — a hot, sharply seasoned mouthful on toast, taken after the sweet and before the dessert fruit — was a fixture of British dinners from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, and Cassell's carries a good many of them: anchovy, mushroom, marrow, cheese, and tomato variants like this one. The category owed its persistence to the claim, generally traced to the port-drinking habits of Victorian dining, that something salt and piquant cleared the palate for the wine. Tinned and bottled tomato purée may already have been reaching British grocers by the time this dictionary appeared, which would be what makes a recipe like this practical in a season when fresh tomatoes were not to be had; the Parmesan and the French mustard mark it as one of the many Cassell's dishes reaching for a Continental register without leaving the English toast rack behind.