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Buttered Tomatoes
Melt one half cup butter; sprinkle six sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper; put in chafing dish; cover and cook twenty minutes. Serve on toast.
Three lines of text and one real technique: tomatoes stewed down in butter until they collapse into their own sauce. Everything depends on managing the water they give up.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan (the blazer) over a spirit lamp or hot-water bath — a tabletop skillet with weak, unsteady heat. A heavy 10-inch skillet over medium-low does the same job, and a lid is essential either way.
- Half a cup of butterThat is 4 oz for six tomatoes, a generous amount. Two to three tablespoons carries the dish; the rest simply pools and is left on the plate unless you intend to spoon the buttery juices over the toast, which is arguably the point.
- Twenty minutes, coveredCovered, the slices steam in their own liquid and slump into a rough sauce rather than browning. If you want any colour on them, cook uncovered for the last five to eight minutes to drive off water — otherwise expect something closer to stewed tomato than sautéed.
- Choose the tomatoesFirm, meaty, fully ripe fruit slumps well; watery out-of-season tomatoes give a thin puddle. Slice thick, about half an inch, so the pieces hold shape through the cooking.
- Skin and seedsThe recipe says nothing about peeling, so the skins presumably stay on, and they will curl loose in the pan. Peel first if that bothers you, or fish the curls out before serving.
- The toastCut it thick and toast it hard. Thin toast disintegrates under buttered tomatoes within a minute.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; six tomatoes would plausibly serve three or four as a light supper or savoury course, one or two slices of toast each.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and published in 1907 — one of a great many cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product in American kitchens. Its chapter of chafing dish recipes reflects a genuine craze: from roughly the 1890s through the 1910s the chafing dish was the fashionable apparatus of college rooms, bachelor lodgings and after-theatre suppers, valued because it let a host cook at the table without a servant or a coal range. The repertoire that grew up around it favoured dishes that were quick, forgiving of low heat and served on toast — Welsh rarebit, creamed oysters, lobster Newburg, and simple vegetable treatments like this one. Tomatoes cooked down in butter and heaped on toast belong to an older Anglo-American habit of "savouries" and light suppers; the chafing dish only changed where they were cooked, not what they were.