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Tomatoes and Onions, Baked
Take a pound of tomatoes, wipe them, cut them in halves, and bake them (see TOMATOES, BAKED). Bake or fry the same weight of Spanish onions, and chop them up. Put the tomatoes, cut side up, on a dish for serving; cover each half with a thin slice of cheese, and put some onions on the top; season nicely, then spread over some bread-crumbs (browned in the oven). Grate a little cheese over, and serve hot. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s.
A simple gratin-style assembly that depends on cooking the tomatoes and onions separately before they meet on the dish. The recipe assumes you have read the book's entry for baked tomatoes, which this page cross-references.
- Bake the two components separatelyThis is the hinge. Tomato halves go cut side up in a 375F oven, 25-30 minutes, until collapsed but still holding shape; the onions are cooked apart and only chopped and piled on at the end. Combining them raw gives a watery dish that will not hold together on the plate.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name, and still the right choice: large, pale, mild and sweet. Whole ones baked in their skins at 375F take 60-75 minutes; sliced and fried in butter, 20-25 minutes over medium-low heat until golden and soft.
- The cheeseUnspecified, as often in Victorian books; Cheshire or a firm English Cheddar would suit. A thin slice per tomato half plus a grating over the crumbs; roughly 3-4 oz in total for a pound of tomatoes.
- "Browned in the oven" crumbsDry white breadcrumbs spread on a tray at around 350F for 8-10 minutes, tossed once. They are browned in advance because the dish is put together from components already cooked and sent to table at once, with no further baking that would colour raw crumbs.
- Season nicelySalt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar if the tomatoes are underripe. A little chopped thyme or basil is in keeping.
- YieldA pound of tomatoes and a pound of onions serves two as a light supper dish, or four as a vegetable alongside meat.
- The cost note10d. to 1s. is pre-decimal British currency, given so a housekeeper could compare dishes. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Cassell's places this among its vegetable entries at a moment when the tomato is often said to have been shifting from hothouse curiosity towards everyday British ingredient, though the change is not sharply datable; through the middle of the nineteenth century it appears in English books mostly as a sauce or a flavouring, and it is generally the spread of cheap glasshouse and imported fruit in the later decades that is credited with putting plain baked tomatoes on ordinary tables. The treatment here — vegetables cooked, layered with cheese, capped with browned crumbs — can be read as a familiar Victorian gratin formula applied to a new vegetable, and the instruction to brown the crumbs beforehand suggests a dish assembled for appearance as much as flavour, meant to arrive at table looking composed. Spanish onions, said to have been imported from the Mediterranean by this period, were prized precisely for the mildness that makes a full pound of them palatable in a single dish.