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Scalloped Tomatoes
Scald and peel half a dozen tomatoes, set them in a buttered baking dish, sprinkle with pepper, salt and a dust of powdered sugar. Cover with buttered dry crumbs and bake till brown.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know what a scalloped dish looks like when it is right: tomatoes collapsed into their own juice under a crisp crumb lid. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the sugar and the water.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Use 375-400F and allow 30 to 40 minutes, until the crumbs are well browned and the juices bubble at the edges. A lower oven leaves the crumbs pale and sodden.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this period this means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. 'A dust' is all the recipe asks for — a scant teaspoon over the whole dish is about the mark; it balances the acid rather than sweetening the dish.
- Scald and peelThirty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold, and the skins slip off. Cut a shallow X in the blossom end first.
- Manage the liquidSix whole peeled tomatoes will flood the dish. Slice them thickly or halve them, salt them, and let them drain in a colander for ten or fifteen minutes before they go in. This is the difference between scalloped tomatoes and tomato soup with a crust.
- Buttered dry crumbsDry crumbs means stale bread grated or crushed, not fresh soft crumbs and not the fine sandy commercial sort. Reckon about a cup, tossed with 2 to 3 tablespoons of melted butter so every crumb is coated; unbuttered crumbs simply absorb juice and stay wet.
- Dish and depthA shallow buttered dish of about 1 to 1.5 quarts. Layering the tomatoes deep in a narrow dish steams them rather than roasting them.
- Out of seasonA 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, drained well and broken up, works in place of the six fresh ones and is closer to what the dish tastes like in August.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
Scalloping — anything baked in a dish under buttered crumbs — was one of the workhorse methods of nineteenth-century American cookery, applied to oysters, potatoes, cabbage, salmon and, in time, tomatoes. The word is generally traced to the scallop shells in which such mixtures were once baked and served, long before the shape became a synonym for the dish. Tomatoes were slow to win American trust as a raw food but were accepted early as a cooked vegetable, and by the time Good Housekeeping was compiling recipes like this one they were a familiar summer crop. The pinch of sugar is the giveaway detail: it is the standard period corrective for the acidity of field tomatoes, and it survives in tomato cookery to this day.