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Scalloped Tomatoes
Arrange in layers canned tomatoes and bread cut in cubes, sprinkle each layer with salt and pepper, dot with butter. Bake one half hour. For variety rub dish with onion before putting in tomato.
A three-sentence recipe that assumes the cook already knows the proportions, the dish size and the oven. Here is what it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe simply says "Bake one half hour." A moderate oven, around 375F, suits it. Bake uncovered so the top layer of bread browns and the tomato liquid reduces.
- ProportionsRoughly one 28-oz can of tomatoes to 3 cups of bread cubes, with 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter dotted over the layers. Finish with bread on top rather than tomato, or the surface stays wet.
- The hinge: drainingCanned tomatoes vary a good deal in how much packing liquid they carry. Drain off some of the juice or the bread dissolves into pink mush instead of holding its shape.
- BreadDay-old firm white bread, cut in half-inch cubes, not fresh sandwich bread and not fine crumbs. Stale bread absorbs the tomato without collapsing.
- Half an hourThirty minutes at 375F is enough to heat through and set, since nothing here needs cooking so much as combining. If the top is pale, run it briefly under the broiler.
- The onion trickRubbing the baking dish with a cut onion is a light touch, closer to seasoning than to an ingredient. A tablespoon of finely minced onion sweated in butter first gives a fuller version of the same idea.
- YieldA 1 1/2-quart dish serves four to six as a side. It reheats acceptably but the bread will have softened throughout.
Scalloped dishes — layered with crumbs or bread and butter, then baked — were the standard American way of turning a bulk ingredient into a dinner-table vegetable in the nineteenth century, applied to potatoes, oysters, corn and cabbage as readily as to tomatoes. That this version calls for canned tomatoes without comment is the interesting part: by the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, commercially canned tomatoes were cheap, reliable and available year-round. The book itself was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its promotional chocolate recipes it carried a full complement of plain household cooking such as this.