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TOMATOES, STEWED (Portuguese way)
Slice half a dozen ripe tomatoes, season with pepper and salt, and put little pieces of butter here and there upon them. Mince two onions finely, sprinkle them over the tomatoes, cover the saucepan closely, and steam them for a quarter of an hour. Afterwards pour a quarter of a pint of good brown gravy over them, stir frequently, and let them simmer gently until done enough. Have ready a quarter of a pound of freshly-boiled rice. Stir this in with the tomatoes, and mix the ingredients thoroughly. Turn the whole upon a hot dish, and send a little more brown sauce to table in a tureen. Time, about one hour to stew the tomatoes. Probable cost, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A stewed tomato dish bound with rice and enriched with meat gravy — closer to a soft pilaf than a vegetable side. Most of the work is in judging how far to reduce the tomatoes.
- The hinge: no added liquid at the startThe first fifteen minutes are a covered sweat, not a boil. The tomatoes must give up their own juice under a tight lid over low heat; adding water or stock here means an hour of reduction later to get back to a sauce.
- A quarter of a pintFive imperial fluid ounces, about 140 ml, or a scant two-thirds of a US cup. British half-pints and quarter-pints run about a fifth larger than American ones.
- "Good brown gravy"In a Victorian kitchen this generally meant a made gravy built on beef or veal stock, browned and thickened, rather than a spoonful of pan juices. A well-reduced beef stock with a little butter-and-flour liaison stands in for it.
- A quarter of a pound of riceAmbiguous as written. Four ounces of dry rice yields roughly three-quarters of a pound cooked, which would still dominate six sliced tomatoes; four ounces of already-boiled rice is the likelier reading and gives the better proportion. Start with the smaller amount and add more if the mixture is loose.
- The one-hour timingSound for the period, when tomatoes were wanted collapsed and jammy rather than holding their shape. Thirty to forty minutes is usually enough with modern fruit; judge by consistency, when the mass mounds on a spoon and no watery liquid separates at the edge.
- OnionsTwo minced raw onions sprinkled over the top get only the covered steam before the gravy goes in, though they do go on cooking through the simmer. Sweating them in the butter first, before the tomatoes go in, costs five minutes and gives a rounder result.
- Skins and seedsThe recipe simply slices the tomatoes, so the skins curl loose in the finished dish. Peeling them first — a cross-cut and thirty seconds in boiling water — gives a smoother result.
- YieldFive or six as a vegetable dish, as the book's own "sufficient for five or six persons" implies. As a main dish it feeds two or three, and wants more rice.
Cassell's habit of tagging a dish "Portuguese way" or "Spanish way" tells you less about Iberia than about how the tomato reached the British table. Through most of the nineteenth century tomatoes were treated in England as a foreign vegetable, and recipes for them were routinely labelled with a southern European nationality as a kind of shorthand for the ingredient itself. The pairing with rice and a meat-based brown sauce suggests that this may have passed through a French-trained professional kitchen on the way: an authentic Portuguese arroz de tomate is built on olive oil, and would not reach for espagnole. The costing given — a probable cost of twopence to sixpence a pound — is worth noting too.