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Stewed Tomatoes
Peel and chop tomatoes till you have a quart. Add one teacup brown sugar, one teacup butter, one teacup bread crumbs. One tablespoonful salt; one teaspoonful black pepper.
Stew till free from lumps and perfectly done. Pour in a deep dish, sift powdered crackers over it, and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
Stewed Tomatoes.
Scald and peel the tomatoes, chop fine, season with salt, pepper, onion, and a little sugar. Put in some pieces of buttered light bread, cut up very fine. Add a lump of butter, and stew in a saucepan.--Mrs. V. P. M.
Two versions of the same Southern side dish, both thickened with bread rather than flour. The proportions in the first are generous even by nineteenth-century standards and want scaling back.
- The teacupA teacup in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the term was never standardised and usage varied from book to book. Take it as 6 fl oz here.
- Cut the saltA tablespoon of salt to a quart of tomatoes is about three times what a modern palate accepts, and period salt was often coarser and so less dense by volume than modern table salt. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Butter and sugarA teacup each of butter and brown sugar makes something closer to a tomato pudding than a vegetable. Two to four tablespoons of each gives the same character without the confectionery effect; the second version's "lump of butter" and "a little sugar" is the saner guide.
- A quart of tomatoesAbout 2 lb of fresh tomatoes, six medium, once peeled and chopped. To peel, score the base and drop into boiling water for 30 seconds, then into cold — that is what "scald and peel" means.
- Light breadOrdinary yeast-raised white loaf, as opposed to cornbread or a soda-risen quick bread. Day-old crumb works best; fresh bread turns to paste.
- Powdered crackersPlain soda or water crackers rolled fine with a pin. Modern saltines are the closest equivalent, and being already salted they are one more reason to hold back on the salt in the pot.
- "Stew till free from lumps"The hinge of the dish. The recipe gives no time or heat; in practice, cook uncovered over low heat, stirring often, until the bread has disappeared into the tomatoes and no watery liquid separates when you draw a spoon across the pan — expect something in the region of half an hour. Rushing it leaves visible bread and a thin, sharp sauce.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. The first version is rich enough that smaller portions suit it.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, which is why the same dish appears twice over two sets of initials — the book prints what each woman sent rather than reconciling them. Stewed tomatoes thickened with buttered bread were standard summer fare across the upper South once the tomato had shed its old reputation as ornamental and suspect, a shift generally traced to the first decades of the nineteenth century. The bread does double duty, soaking up the water that fresh tomatoes throw off and stretching a glut from the garden into something substantial enough to hold its place beside meat. The sugar is not a Southern eccentricity so much as a correction: field tomatoes picked before full ripeness are acidic, and cooks sweetened them the way they sweetened rhubarb.