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Tomatoes, Stewed
Take six or eight ripe red tomatoes. Remove the stalks, slice the fruit, and put the slices into a lined saucepan. Season with pepper and salt, and place about two ounces of butter divided into little pieces here and there amongst them. Cover the saucepan closely, and simmer the tomatoes gently until they are quite tender. Stir them two or three times, and serve on a hot dish as an accompaniment to roast meat. A spoonful or two of vinegar will be an improvement. Time to stew the tomatoes, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, tomatoes, 2d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain buttered tomato stew that still works exactly as written; the only real decisions are the pan, the moisture and how far you take the reduction.
- "Lined saucepan"Victorian copper pans were tinned inside because bare copper reacts with acid. Any stainless, enamelled or nonstick pan does the job; avoid unlined cast iron or aluminium, which will pick up a metallic edge from the tomatoes.
- QuantitiesSix to eight ripe tomatoes is roughly 2 lb, and two ounces of butter is half a stick (about 55 g). That is a generous amount of butter for the weight, which is the point of the dish.
- Peeling and seedsThe recipe leaves the skins on, and they will curl into tough strips in the finished dish. If that bothers you, score and blanch the tomatoes for 30 seconds first and slip the skins off before slicing.
- Twenty minutes, coveredClosely covered, the tomatoes give up a lot of liquid and you get something closer to a loose sauce than a stew. Take the lid off for the last five or ten minutes if you want it thick enough to sit beside roast meat without flooding the plate.
- The vinegarAdd it at the end, off the heat, or the sharpness cooks off. A teaspoon or two of cider or white wine vinegar is plenty for 2 lb; the older palate for sweet-sour vegetables beside roast meat is what is being served here.
- Out-of-season fruitSupermarket winter tomatoes are watery and low in sugar. Tinned whole plum tomatoes, drained, give a better result than pale fresh ones, though the texture will be softer.
- Yield"Sufficient for five or six persons" assumes a side dish among several. Reckon on four as a modern vegetable serving.
Cassell's places this among the plainest of its tomato entries, which is telling: when the dictionary was compiled the tomato is often said to have been still something of a newcomer to the British vegetable table, more often met with as a sauce, a ketchup or a hothouse curiosity than as something simply stewed in butter. The entry gives a price note, "2d. to 6d. per pound". Serving them as an accompaniment to roast meat, sharpened with a spoonful of vinegar, follows the older English habit of pairing roasts with an acid vegetable or preserve, the same logic that puts apple sauce next to pork and redcurrant jelly next to mutton.