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Tomatoes, Scalloped
Pour boiling water over six large tomatoes for a few seconds, then peel them. Butter a fire-proof dish and lay some slices of tomato at the bottom, then a layer of bread-crumbs, a good sprinkling of pepper and salt, an ounce of oiled butter, and a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley. Add more tomatoes and butter, and bake in a fairly hot oven for twenty minutes.
A straightforward tomato gratin; the only real risks are a watery result and an underseasoned middle. A few notes on the period vocabulary and quantities.
- "Fairly hot oven"Roughly 375-400F (190-200C); period oven terms translate only approximately. Twenty minutes at that heat softens the tomatoes without collapsing them entirely.
- Oiled butterPeriod shorthand for butter melted gently until liquid but not browned or foaming, i.e. melted butter. An ounce is 2 tablespoons; the recipe specifies that amount for the first layer only and leaves the second ("more tomatoes and butter") unmeasured, so perhaps twice that in total.
- Fire-proof dishAny shallow earthenware or glass baking dish; ordinary table china of the period could not be trusted in a direct oven, so the distinction mattered then and does not now. A dish of roughly 8 inches square suits six tomatoes.
- Drain the tomatoesThe hinge of the dish. Sliced tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid, and the crumbs will turn to paste if it pools. Salt the slices and let them stand ten minutes on a rack or cloth before layering, and pour off what collects.
- Bread-crumbsUse dry or lightly stale crumbs, not fresh soft ones from a modern sandwich loaf, which slump. Finish with a layer of crumbs and butter on top so it browns rather than steams.
- Seasoning every layerThe recipe names pepper and salt only for the first layer, but the abbreviated "add more tomatoes and butter" almost certainly assumes the same treatment repeated; season each layer or the centre will taste flat.
- YieldSix large tomatoes fill a small dish and serve four as a side, two or three as a light supper dish with bread.
Scalloped vegetables — sliced, layered with buttered crumbs and baked — were a staple of late nineteenth-century English and American household cookery, the word "scallop" in cookery being generally traced to the shell in which such mixtures were once baked. The dish reflects how recently the tomato had become ordinary British food: for much of the century it was a glasshouse crop used mainly as a sauce or a relish. Expanding glasshouse production and imports from the Channel Islands and the Mediterranean brought the price down towards the end of the century, by which point a general dictionary of cookery could give tomatoes several entries, including simple baked treatments like this one that assume the cook has half a dozen ripe fruit to spare.