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Tomatoes, Stewed Whole
Take six or eight ripe tomatoes of medium size. Remove the stalks, and arrange the fruit in a stewpan in a single layer. Pour over them as much good brown gravy as will reach to half their height, stew them gently until they are done enough, and turn them over carefully once or twice that they may be equally cooked. Thicken the gravy with a little flour and butter, season with pepper and salt, and let it boil two or three minutes after the thickening is added. Serve the tomatoes very hot with the sauce round them. Time, twenty to twenty-five minutes. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward braise that stands or falls on the gravy and on choosing tomatoes firm enough to hold together. Nothing here is dangerous; the only real risk is a pan of collapsed pulp.
- Choose firm fruit"Ripe" here means coloured through but still hard to the thumb. Dead-ripe supermarket tomatoes will split and slump long before twenty minutes are up; medium plum or vine tomatoes hold their shape best.
- Good brown gravyIn Victorian kitchens this generally meant a brown meat stock or sauce, coloured and lightly seasoned, rather than thickened roast drippings; the recipe's own instruction to thicken it later suggests it arrives unthickened. A well-reduced beef stock, or stock with a spoonful of tomato-free demi-glace, gives the right body.
- StewpanA broad pan with a lid; descriptions of its depth vary. Any wide saute pan that takes the tomatoes in one uncrowded layer will do; crowding them means they steam into each other and break.
- Cooking timeTwenty to twenty-five minutes assumes gentle heat with the liquid barely trembling; at a brisk simmer the skins are liable to burst well before that. Keep the surface just moving and turn them once, with two spoons rather than a fork.
- SkinsThe recipe leaves them on, which is what holds the fruit together. If you would rather not serve skins, nick a cross in the base and scald them first, but expect a softer result and shorten the cooking accordingly.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" means beurre manié — equal weights mashed to a paste, whisked into the hot gravy off the boil, then boiled two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour. Lift the tomatoes out first; whisking around them will wreck them.
- SeasoningTomato acidity sharpens as the gravy reduces. Taste before salting, and a pinch of sugar is a fair correction if the fruit is underripe.
- Yield and servingFive or six as a vegetable course alongside roast or grilled meat, not as a dish on its own. Serve on a warmed shallow dish with the sauce poured round rather than over.
- The cost lineTwopence to sixpence a pound is a late-Victorian British price and is only useful as a period detail; the top of that range presumably reflects early or hothouse-grown fruit.
Cassell's belongs to the moment when the tomato had finally stopped being a curiosity in British cookery and become an ordinary vegetable -- its recipes treat it as fruit to be stewed, baked, forced and made into sauce, all in the same register as the marrow or the artichoke. Note the older habit of calling it "the fruit", and the older assumption that a vegetable dish is properly finished with meat gravy: a nineteenth-century English kitchen of this class ran on a stockpot, and a brown sauce was a common dressing for dishes served hot alongside a joint. The name comes through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl, and the plant reached British gardens in the sixteenth century, though it was long grown chiefly as an ornamental and eaten with suspicion. By the date of this book glasshouse growing and imports had brought the price low enough for a household manual to assume six or eight of them without comment.