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Tomatoes, Roast
Take six or eight small ripe tomatoes. Slice off the stalks and the parts that adhere to them. Put them in a Dutch oven, place them before the fire, and roast them until done enough. Serve on a hot dish as an accompaniment to roast meat. If it is more convenient they may be placed at the edge of the dripping-tin instead of in the Dutch oven, but care must be taken that the fat from the joint does not fall upon them. Time to roast, twelve to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A one-ingredient side dish from the era of open-hearth roasting. The translation to a modern kitchen is straightforward once you know what the equipment was.
- "Dutch oven" is not a casseroleIn British books of this period a Dutch oven is a reflector oven: an open-fronted metal box or hood set on the hearth facing the fire, with the food inside catching radiant heat. It is not the heavy lidded pot the term means today. The closest modern equivalent is a hot oven or a grill/broiler.
- Heat and positionRoasting before the fire means fierce dry radiant heat on one side. The original gives no temperature; a hot oven (around 425F) on a shallow tray is a reasonable modern substitute, though the timing may need adjusting, and under a grill they will blister faster and want turning.
- The dripping-tin warningThe instruction to keep the joint's fat off the tomatoes is the hinge of the recipe. Beef or mutton dripping soaking into the fruit turns a bright, sharp accompaniment into something heavy and greasy, and the water the tomatoes throw off will make the fat spit.
- Cut side and stalk"The parts that adhere to them" most likely means the pale, tough core beneath the stalk scar. The original says to slice it off, but cutting it out with the point of a knife will help the tomato hold together as it softens.
- TimingTwelve to twenty minutes is accurate for small tomatoes; take them out while the skins are split and browned but the flesh still holds its shape. Left longer they collapse into a puddle on the serving dish.
- SeasoningThe original gives none, which is typical of an accompaniment expected to be eaten with a well-seasoned joint and its gravy. Salt, pepper and a little oil brushed over before roasting are entirely in keeping.
- Cost and yieldTwopence to sixpence a pound is Victorian retail pricing, given as a range as these entries usually are. Six to eight small tomatoes serving five or six people tells you this is a garnish-sized portion, not a vegetable course.
Cassell's places this among the plainest of its vegetable entries, and its plainness is the point: tomatoes were still a relative newcomer to routine British cookery in the later nineteenth century, more often stewed, sauced or forced with breadcrumbs than simply set before the fire. Recipes like this one, which treat the tomato as an accompaniment to roast meat in the way a household might treat a baked apple with pork, are often taken to show the fruit moving from the ornamental and the medicinal into the ordinary dinner, though the story is more traditional than documented. The reliance on the reflector oven and the dripping-tin also dates the entry firmly to hearth roasting, a method that survived in British kitchens well after the closed range arrived; the preference for meat roasted before an open fire over meat baked in a box is often said to have played a part.