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Tomato Toast
Stew 1/2 of a can of tomatoes, 1 clove, a sprig of parsley, a slice of onion, ½ of a cupful of water and salt and pepper to taste for twenty minutes, then press through a sieve. Return to the fire, thicken with 1 scant tablespoonful of corn-starch or 1 tablespoonful of flour dissolved in a little cold water, and simmer for five minutes. Have ready a number of slices of toasted bread. Spread on a platter, pour the tomato over them, cover for a moment or set in a cool oven that the toast may soak and swell, and serve. Nice for lunch or a hot supper Tomatoes on Toast, Indian Style Cut a number of half-inch slices of stale bread and stamp into rounds with a biscuit cutter.
Sauté them a pale brown on both sides in a little hot butter and drain on unglazed paper. Select large firm tomatoes and cut into thick slices, allowing 2 for each slice of bread. Open a good sized green pepper, remove seeds and veins and shave into strips with a sharp knife. Drop these into boiling water for a moment, skim out, drop into ice water for five minutes and dry in a towel.
Wipe the sliced tomatoes dry, flour thoroughly and fry quickly a golden brown in butter. Lay a slice on each piece of bread, dust with a little salt, sprinkle with some of the prepared strips of pepper, cover with a second slice of tomato.
Have I or 2 yolks of hard-boiled eggs in a potato masher, press a little over the top of each and put a circle of finely chopped parsley round the edge. Serve at once on a heated dish.
A thrifty two-part entry: a strained tomato sauce poured over toast, followed by a dressier fried-tomato version. Both are quick, and both live or die on the toast staying crisp long enough to reach the table.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied and were often larger than today's 14-15 oz tin, so "half a can" may mean anywhere from about a cup to two cups of tomatoes with their juice; a cupful or so is a workable reading. Canned diced or crushed tomatoes serve as well, since the mixture is sieved anyway.
- The clove is the spice, not garlic"1 clove" here means one whole dried clove, dropped in with the parsley and onion and left behind in the sieve. One is enough for a cup of tomato; two will dominate.
- Thickening ratioA scant tablespoon of cornstarch or a full tablespoon of flour to the sieved purée (depending on how large the can was and how much reduced in twenty minutes' stewing, something over a cupful) gives a sauce that coats rather than sets. Slake it in cold water first, as the recipe directs, and give the flour version the full five minutes to lose its raw taste.
- A cool ovenRoughly 250F or below, though period oven terms are approximate. The point is only to hold the dish while the toast absorbs sauce, not to bake it; a few minutes is plenty, longer and the toast collapses.
- Toast timing is the hingeMake the sauce first and toast last. Bread toasted in advance goes leathery, and bread that sits under tomato for more than a few minutes turns to paste.
- Unglazed paperOld kitchens drained fried food on butcher's or brown paper. Paper towels do the same job.
- Blanching the pepperThe dip in boiling water and then ice water sets the green colour and takes the raw edge off the strips. Ten to fifteen seconds in the boiling water is enough for shaved strips.
- Sieving the yolkA potato masher was used as a coarse ricer; a fine sieve pressed with the back of a spoon gives a better crumb of hard-boiled yolk.
- YieldThe stewed version sauces about four slices of toast, enough for two at lunch. The Indian-style rounds are one to a person as a first course, two as a light supper.
Toast as a base for a hot savoury was one of the most economical dishes a late-nineteenth-century household could put up: it used stale bread, stretched a small quantity of anything wet, and needed no meat. Canned tomatoes made the first version possible year-round and cheaply -- commercial tomato canning had grown large enough by the closing decades of the century to put tins within reach of modest kitchens. The second recipe's "Indian style" refers to the Anglo-Indian cookery then fashionable in British and American books; the label was applied loosely and rarely reflected any specific Indian dish.