Tomatos
Tomato Sauce. Take a pint of the purée of tomatos, either out of a tin or made from fresh tomatos, and put them in a stewpan with pepper, salt, a good pinch of sugar, a quarter of a pint of Mirepoix, a pint of gravy or broth, an ounce of flour, and one of butter. Let them simmer for three-quarters of an hour, then pass all through a sieve.
Tomato Soup-is tomato sauce with three pints of gravy or broth in it instead of one. Add at the last some rice.
Roast Tomatos.-Roast them well in a Dutch oven, and turn them often. Or bake them in a casserole, the bottom of which has been buttered. They ought to be ready in from ten to fifteen minutes, and to be served with roast mutton, or mutton chops and cutlets.
Stuffed Tomatos. - Choose six or seven large and wellshaped ones; cut open the tops and scoop out the insides carefully. Pass the pulp through a sieve to get rid of the pips, and mix with it about two ounces of butter (the French say oil), a chopped shalot, a chopped clove of Toss garlic, pepper and salt. Cook it for ten or fifteen minutes; then stir into it a small cupful of breadcrumbs which have soaked in broth, and the yolks of two eggs. When this is cold, fill the tomato skins with it, shake some fine bread raspings over them, and bake them briskly for ten or twelve minutes.
Tomato Salad.-Divide the tomatos horizontally, and squeeze out the pips. Then cut up the halves and mix them with a cruet sauce. For the tomato salad a dash of mustard is not a bad addition, but the tomatos being juicy in themselves, require less than the usual quantity of oil and vinegar. For garniture, some chopped spring onions or chives. One or two tomatos, cut up as above described, make an excellent addition to a salad of cos-lettuce. Toss. This is the English for Sauter, which see. To toss is to fry very lightly; and the tossing is necessary in order both to equalise the heat and to keep it down. Frying proper on a steady fire evolves a roasting heat. Tossing is, so to speak, opposed to frying. It is to fry and not to fry. It is an attempt to produce some of the effects of frying, and not the others. It is to fry without producing the brittle surface of frying.
Five short tomato preparations from a Victorian dictionary of cookery, written for kitchens with an open fire and a stockpot always going. The substitutions are mostly a matter of what stood in for stock and for the old moistening preparations.
- Mirepoix is not diced vegetables hereMirepoix in this period means the older French braising preparation rather than a raw dice: a liquid, measured here by the quarter pint, built on root vegetables with bacon or ham trimmings and wine. Lacking it, sweat a small carrot, onion and celery stick with a little chopped bacon in butter, add a splash of dry white wine or Madeira, and use that.
- Gravy and broth"Gravy" in Victorian usage is a strong brown meat stock, not a thickened pan sauce. Unsalted beef or veal stock is the modern stand-in; if you use a commercial stock, hold back on the salt, since the sauce reduces for three-quarters of an hour.
- UnitsA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so the sauce starts with about 2 1/2 cups of purée and the same of stock. An ounce each of flour and butter is a small roux -- about 1/4 cup of flour to 2 tablespoons of butter; it thickens lightly rather than binding.
- The rice in the soupRice stirred in "at the last" will not cook through in the time given. Cook it separately and add it to the strained soup. The soup, with three pints of stock, serves six to eight.
- Dutch oven means a reflectorA Victorian Dutch oven is an open-fronted tin box set facing the fire, which is why the tomatoes must be turned often. A hot oven or a very hot broiler gives much the same effect; ten to fifteen minutes is right for halved or whole medium tomatoes. "Bake them in a casserole" means a buttered shallow pan, not a covered baked dish.
- Bread raspingsRaspings are the dried, grated crust of a stale loaf, finer and darker than fresh crumbs. Dry breadcrumbs or panko will do; they exist to colour and crisp the top in the ten to twelve brisk minutes given, so the oven wants to be hot.
- Stuffed tomatoes: cool the fillingThe instruction to let the mixture go cold before filling the shells is the hinge. Warm filling slackens and weeps into the skins.
- Cruet sauce for the saladA cruet sauce is simply oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and here a little mustard, mixed at table from the cruet stand. Note that the book asks for less than the usual quantity of both oil and vinegar, the tomatoes being juicy in themselves.
- The "Toss" entryThe paragraph beginning "Toss" is a separate dictionary headword that happens to follow on the same page. It is a definition of sautéing, not a step in any of the tomato dishes.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Kettner's, the Soho restaurant then keeping a French kitchen for London diners. Its dictionary form explains the shape of this entry: tomatoes get one headword covering sauce, soup, roasting, stuffing and salad, with cross-references to French technique. The casualness of "either out of a tin or made from fresh tomatos" is worth noticing, since canned tomatoes are often said to have been fairly new in British kitchens and the fresh fruit was seasonal and, in England, largely a hothouse crop. For stuffed tomatoes in the Provençal manner, with shallot, garlic and oil, Dallas notes in parenthesis that the French would use oil where an English cook reaches for butter. The pairing of roast tomatoes with mutton chops is very much of the period; mutton was the everyday English roast.