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Tomato Fricassee
Peel and slice tomatoes and fry in butter. Make sauce of teaspoon flour and one cup of milk, and pour over them. Serve on toast.
— Mrs. H. B. Morrison
A terse village receipt that assumes you already know how to build a cream sauce. The proportions are all in the cook's head, so here is what the sparse wording implies.
- Quantities and yieldAs written this serves two to three: reckon on 3 or 4 medium tomatoes, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour rather than a teaspoon, and 1 cup milk. A single teaspoon of flour will not thicken a cup of milk to anything but a thin wash.
- "Make sauce of"The wording implies a plain white sauce; one workable reading is to make it in the same pan: after the tomatoes come out, stir the flour into the buttery fond, cook it a minute so it loses its raw taste, then whisk in the milk off the heat and return it to a simmer until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and plenty of pepper, which the receipt omits.
- Peel the tomatoes properlyA 20-second dip in boiling water and a cold rinse slips the skins off cleanly; a knife will do on firm fruit. Skins left on curl into tough strips in the pan.
- Slice thickHalf-inch slices hold together. Thin slices collapse into sauce before they take on any color, which defeats the frying step.
- Keep the butter hot and the pan uncrowdedTomatoes are mostly water. Fry in batches over fairly brisk heat so they brown at the edges rather than stew; drain the released juice off before it dilutes the sauce.
- Do not combine earlyPour the sauce over the tomatoes at the table or just before serving. Held together, the acid in the tomatoes can curdle the milk and thin the sauce.
- The toastUse a sturdy bread, toasted dry and hard. Soft sandwich bread turns to paste under tomato and cream within a minute.
Fricassee properly means meat, usually poultry, cut up and cooked in a pale sauce rather than browned in a roast, and by the late nineteenth century American home cooks were freely borrowing the word for anything served in a white sauce. Vegetable "fricassees" of this kind — tomatoes, oysters, corn, salsify — turn up in community cookbooks of the period, and the pairing with toast points to its place as a supper or breakfast dish rather than a dinner course. The receipt also marks the season: tomatoes were a late-summer glut, and a contributor's name attached to four lines of instruction was the standard currency of a church or village fundraising cookbook.