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Stewed Tomatoes
Pour boiling water over twelve good-sized tomatoes, with a sharp knife remove the skins and hard stem ends, and cut them in small pieces. Put in a porcelain lined or granite
A plain preparation whose only real technique is the boiling-water peel and a slow, uncovered stew in a pan that will not react with acid.
- Twelve tomatoesTwelve good-sized round tomatoes will be somewhere in the region of 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb, depending on what the writer counted as good-sized, and will cook down to a few cups of stewed tomatoes. Plum or paste varieties give a thicker result with less draining.
- The boiling-water peelPouring boiling water over whole tomatoes loosens the skins only if the fruit is ripe and the water genuinely boiling; leave them 20 to 30 seconds, no more, then lift them out. A shallow X cut in the blossom end first makes the skin slip away in one piece. Overripe tomatoes will start to poach and go to mush.
- Hard stem endsThe instruction to cut out the stem end matters more with larger fruit, which can carry a tough pale core running well down into the flesh. It does not soften with cooking and should come out.
- "Porcelain lined or granite"Both mean an enamelled cast-iron or enamelled steel pan. The point is a non-reactive surface: tomatoes are acid enough to pick up a metallic taste and a grey cast from bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper. Stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Stewing timeThe recipe as printed here breaks off before the cooking instructions. In practice, cooking uncovered over low heat lets water evaporate rather than collect; fifteen to twenty-five minutes gives soft pieces that still hold their shape, while an hour reduces them to a thick sauce. Stir occasionally, as the sugars in tomato catch on the bottom of the pan.
- SeasoningPeriod recipes of this kind finish with butter, salt, pepper and often a pinch of sugar to offset acidity, and sometimes bread or cracker crumbs stirred in at the end to thicken. Add crumbs only in the last few minutes or they turn pasty.
Stewed tomatoes were one of the ways nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cooks made a summer glut usable, and the dish sits in the vegetable chapter of household manuals as a matter of course. The tomato is often said to have been slow to win trust in Anglo-American kitchens, and long cooking, seasoning and thickening with crumbs were part of how it was domesticated into a respectable cooked vegetable rather than eaten raw. Enamelled wares such as porcelain-lined and granite pans became widely available in the later 1800s and were promoted precisely for acid foods like tomatoes, fruit and pickles, which discoloured in the bare iron and tin pots that came before.