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Stewed Tomatoes
Pour boiling water over them, with a sharp knife remove the skins and the hard stem ends, and cut them in small pieces. Stew in a porcelain lined or granite saucepan for a half hour, then add to every quart of tomatoes, a tablespoonful of butter, a teaspoonful of sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Stew fifteen or twenty minutes longer, or until they are of the desired thickness.
Some prefer the tomatoes stewed only thirty minutes and thickened with bread crumbs.
A slice of onion may be added to the tomatoes when first put on to cook, and to me is a great improvement, filling the same place that the sprig of mint does in peas or beans,
A straightforward stewed tomato, written for a cook who buys tomatoes by the quart already peeled and chopped. The only real technical concern is the pan.
- Why porcelain or granite"Granite" means graniteware, enamel over steel; both it and "porcelain lined" are non-reactive. Tomatoes are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined copper, so use stainless, enamel or a well-seasoned nonstick pan.
- A quart of tomatoesMeasured after peeling and cutting. A quart of prepared tomatoes takes something over 2 lb of whole fruit; canned whole tomatoes, drained, can stand in, measured by volume rather than by can size. The butter, sugar, salt and pepper scale from that quart.
- PeelingBoiling water poured over the tomatoes only loosens the skin if the fruit is ripe and the contact is brief. Thirty seconds in the water, then cold water, and the skins slip off; leave them soaking and the outer flesh turns to mush.
- The sugar is corrective, not sweeteningThe sugar -- A teaspoonful per quart is a small amount; it can sweeten and it can offset the acidity of underripe or out-of-season fruit. With good late-summer tomatoes you may want none at all, so taste before adding it.
- Total time and thicknessForty-five to fifty minutes of open simmering reduces the tomatoes to a thick spoonable stew. Stir toward the end, when the mixture is thick enough to catch and scorch on the bottom.
- The bread crumb variationThe recipe gives no quantity. Crumbs stirred in and given a few minutes to swell give body without the long reduction; judge the amount by the thickness wanted.
- The onionA single thick slice, added at the start and fished out or left in as you prefer, is what the author is after — background sweetness rather than an onion flavour. Chopped onion makes a different, more assertive dish.
- YieldA quart of prepared tomatoes cooks down to serve about four as a side dish.
Stewed tomatoes belong to the long American habit of cooking tomatoes down rather than eating them raw — a habit often said to have outlasted an early suspicion of the fruit, though that resistance is generally reckoned to have faded well before the century was out, and it persisted well into the era of home canning, when a shelf of quart jars made the dish a year-round standby. Tomatoes come in at the height of summer in quantities no household could eat fresh, and half an hour on the stove was a way to use a glut without lighting the oven. The comparison to a sprig of mint in peas is a period commonplace, the sort of small flavouring convention — mint with peas, onion with tomatoes, a blade of mace in white sauce — that cookbooks passed along as settled good sense rather than as recipe instructions.