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Cheese and Tomatoes
3 tablespoonfuls grated cheese 4 ripe tomatoes 2 eggs 1 tablespoonful butter Salt and paprika to taste Skin the tomatoes and rub them through a sieve, add the cheese, salt, paprika, and eggs well beaten. Melt the butter in an earthenware dish, pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes. Serve immediately.
1 lb. pot cheese
A soft tomato-and-cheese custard baked in the dish it is served from. The whole thing hinges on the tomato purée being thick enough that the eggs can set rather than weep.
- The stray last line"I lb. pot cheese" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the section and has nothing to do with this one. The "I" elsewhere in the list is an old typesetting of the numeral 1, so read 1 tablespoonful butter and 1 lb.
- Moderate oven350F. Egg mixtures of this kind curdle and weep if driven too hard, so err low rather than high.
- Ten minutes is optimisticTwo eggs and a cup or so of tomato purée will need 20 to 30 minutes at 350F in a shallow earthenware dish before the centre is just set and barely trembling. Check with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Sieving the tomatoesSkinning is easiest after 20 seconds in boiling water. Rubbing through a sieve removes seeds and, more importantly, lets you drain off the loose juice — a watery purée gives a watery custard.
- The cheeseThree tablespoons of grated cheese was probably a dry aged Cheddar or an American "store cheese". Parmesan or a sharp Cheddar both work; something young and rubbery will string rather than blend.
- EarthenwareThe butter is melted in the baking dish itself, so the dish goes to the table. Modern stoneware or a small gratin dish is fine; do not put cold ceramic into a hot oven.
- PaprikaRead as a mild paprika, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked paprika will dominate the tomato.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or four as a first course. Best eaten straight from the oven, as the original directs.
Casserole cookery books proliferated in the English-speaking world in the first decades of the twentieth century, when fireless cookers, gas ranges and oven-to-table earthenware were all new enough to need explaining; the appeal was fuel economy and one fewer serving dish to wash. This particular formula sits in a long line of savoury baked cheese custards descending from the same idea as a cheese pudding or a fondue in the older French sense — eggs, cheese and a liquid, set gently. Tomatoes, long since domesticated in American and British kitchens, were cheap and canned in quantity, and turned up in exactly this sort of meatless dish.