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Tomatoes Portugaise
Peel and thinly slice 2 mild onions. Peel and cut into quarters 1 quart of small firm tomatoes.
Put together in a saucepan, cover and cook slowly for twenty minutes, shaking occasionally to prevent sticking. Add 1 pint of thickened beef gravy and a high seasoning of salt and pepper. Cook fifteen minutes longer, add 1 pint of hot boiled rice, stir carefully for a moment and send to the table with an extra bowl of the gravy.
A frugal skillet dish that leans entirely on the beef gravy for richness — there is no added fat anywhere in it, which is the point and also the hinge.
- The dry startOnions and tomatoes go into the pan with no butter or oil, so the covered pot and the tomato juice are the only things standing between you and scorching. Keep the heat genuinely low and shake or stir every few minutes as directed; a heavy pan helps. A tablespoon of butter or oil at the start is a small betrayal of the economy but removes the risk entirely.
- Quart of tomatoesMeasured by volume, as produce often was: roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of small tomatoes, quartered. Cherry or cocktail tomatoes halved work well, and a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes, drained and broken up, is a fair winter substitute.
- A pint of gravyTwo cups of flour-thickened brown gravy, the kind left from a roast. Two cups of beef stock thickened with a roux of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour gives similar body. The recipe also asks for an extra bowl of gravy at the table but does not say how much, so make more than the pint the dish itself takes.
- A pint of boiled riceTwo cups of already-cooked hot rice, not raw. That is about 2/3 cup of long-grain rice before cooking. Stir it in off the heat or at the barest simmer; the instruction to stir "carefully for a moment" is about not mashing the grains or the softened tomatoes.
- High seasoningPeriod shorthand for seasoning assertively rather than to a whisper. Cooked-down tomatoes and gravy both need more salt than you expect; taste after the rice goes in, since it dilutes everything.
- Total timingThirty-five minutes of cooking in total. The first twenty minutes are covered, so expect a soft, saucy result rather than a heavily reduced one; cutting the time short leaves the dish watery.
- YieldServes four as a vegetable side, or two or three as a supper dish with bread.
In French kitchen shorthand, à la portugaise signals tomatoes — a garnish or sauce of tomato with onion and often garlic. The link to Portugal is traditional rather than documented. The label stuck to a whole family of tomato-and-onion preparations that appeared in English-language cookbooks with only a loose relationship to Portugal or to each other. The pint of leftover beef gravy does the work that butter, stock and cream would do in a restaurant version, and the rice stretches a modest amount of vegetable into a dish that can stand as a main course. Sending a second bowl of gravy to the table is the same instinct: the flavour is in the gravy, so serve more of it.