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Tomato Toast with Bacon
Make tomato sauce as follows: 1. can tomatoes 1/3 C flour Salt, pepper and sugar to taste Pour sauce over slices of toast and garnish plentifully with crisp bacon.
Mrs. R. F. Wright..
A church-supper luncheon dish written in the shorthand of someone who assumed you already knew how to make a thickened tomato sauce. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: cook the flour outA third of a cup of raw flour stirred straight into hot tomatoes will taste pasty and go lumpy. Whisk the flour into a few tablespoons of the bacon fat over low heat, cook it a minute or two, then add the tomatoes gradually.
- Can sizes have shrunkA "can tomatoes" in this period was probably larger than the modern standard, commonly somewhere around a pound to a pound and a half of tomatoes with their liquid. A 14.5 oz can is the nearest small modern equivalent; scale the flour to whatever volume you actually have rather than to the recipe's figure.
- That much flour is a lotOne third cup to a single small can gives a very stiff sauce, closer to a paste than a gravy. Half that is enough to coat toast without soaking through, and you can always cook it down further.
- Fat is assumed, not listedNo butter or drippings appears in the ingredients, and the bacon is the likeliest intended source. Fry the bacon first, keep two to three tablespoons of the fat, and build the sauce in the same pan.
- Smooth or rusticCanned tomatoes of the era were often packed whole or in large pieces. Break them up with a spoon, or press the finished sauce through a sieve if you want a smooth version.
- The sugar is doing real workCanned tomatoes can be sharply acidic. Start with half a teaspoon, taste, and stop when the sharpness rounds off rather than sweetening the dish.
- The toastUse a firm white bread cut thick and toasted dry on both sides. Thin sandwich bread collapses under a flour-thickened sauce within a minute.
- YieldAs written this covers four to six slices of toast, enough for three or four people as a light lunch with a salad.
Creamed and sauced things on toast were a mainstay of American luncheon cookery from the 1890s through the 1930s: cheap, quick, and made almost entirely from what was already in the house. Community cookbooks, sold to raise funds and filled with recipes contributed under members' married names, are full of them. Canned tomatoes were the enabling ingredient — commercially canned in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, they were among the first processed foods a thrifty cook could rely on year-round, and they turned a summer dish into a February one. The brevity of the instructions is not necessarily carelessness; a contributor writing for her neighbors could reasonably assume everyone knew how to thicken a sauce and fry bacon.