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Scalloped Rice and Tomatoes
1 pt. cooked rice 1 pt. chopped tomatoes, cooked 1 C grated cheese Salt, pepper, little sugar 1 t onion juice Mix all together. Put in buttered casserole. Cover the top with equal parts bread crumbs and grated cheese. Bake an hour.
A church-supper casserole reduced to its essentials: cooked rice, cooked tomatoes, cheese. The original assumes you have leftovers of the first two and an oven already warm from something else.
- Pints, not poundsA pint here is a measure of volume: 2 cups cooked rice and 2 cups cooked chopped tomatoes. A 14.5-oz can of tomatoes, drained of the thinnest liquid, comes to a little under that; from fresh you would need something more like 1 1/2 to 2 lb, stewed down.
- No temperature givenThe recipe names no heat. A moderate oven, about 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for a buttered dish with crumbs on top. Recipes of this kind often leave the temperature unstated, the cook being expected to judge the oven for herself.
- An hour is too longAn hour is a long bake -- Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the bake is mainly to marry the flavors and brown the top. Thirty to forty minutes at 350F will do it; a full hour risks drying the rice and making the cheese greasy.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or press it in a garlic press. A teaspoon is a small amount of assertive flavor. Minced onion is not quite the same thing, since it leaves pieces of onion in the dish rather than the juice alone.
- Grated cheeseMost likely a firm yellow American cheese, sharp or mild. Cheddar works; use about 1 cup mixed through and another 1/2 cup for the crumb topping, mixed with an equal 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs -- the recipe gives only the proportion, not the amount.
- The casseroleIn a book of this vintage the word usually means the ovenproof baking dish rather than the dish of food. A 1 1/2-quart dish suits this quantity.
- Seasoning and the sugarThe "little sugar" is there to blunt the acidity of the tomatoes, not to sweeten. A quarter teaspoon is enough with modern canned tomatoes. Salt firmly, since plain rice absorbs a great deal of it.
- YieldServes four as a main dish or six as a side. It reheats well, covered, at 325F.
Scalloped dishes — anything layered with crumbs and baked — were the backbone of American church and club cookbooks in the early twentieth century because they stretched leftovers, could be assembled in advance, and traveled to a supper in the dish they were baked in. Rice and tomatoes together is a much older pairing, familiar from Southern and Creole cooking, but in a community collection of this kind it appears as a meatless, thrifty filler for a crowd. The tomatoes may well have been home-canned; the cheese was the cheap factory cheddar that made the era's countless "scallops" and "rarebits" possible.