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Baked Tomato on Toast
6 slices of bread 6 thick slices of tomatoes 1 tablespoon butter 3/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Trim the crust from the bread and toast to an even brown. Select firm ripe tomatoes. Remove the stem, and cut into two or three slices according to the thickness of the tomato. The slices should be about three-quarters of an inch thick. Place the tomatoes in a buttered pan; sprinkle with salt, and dot each slice with a bit of butter. Bake twenty to thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Moisten the toast by dipping quickly into the hot milk. Place a slice of baked tomato on each slice of toast. Garnish with a sprig of parsley.
A simple wartime-era supper dish that depends almost entirely on the quality of the tomatoes and on getting the toast moistened without turning it to mush.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat thick tomato slices soften and concentrate in 20-30 minutes without collapsing.
- Choosing the tomatoesFirm, ripe and large enough to yield 3/4-inch slices that hold together. Out-of-season supermarket tomatoes will weep and go watery; a meaty variety works far better than a thin-walled salad type.
- The hinge: the milk dipDip the toast quickly, a second or two per side, in milk heated just to steaming. Leave it longer and the bread disintegrates under the tomato.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon across six slices is barely a dot each, plus whatever goes on the pan. Two or three tablespoons gives a better result if you are not economising.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for six slices is modest. Black pepper, and a pinch of sugar on underripe fruit, are reasonable additions, though neither is in the original.
- Pan and timingUse a shallow buttered baking dish just large enough to hold the slices in one layer; crowded slices steam. Spoon any pan juices over the toast before serving.
- YieldSix slices. The book gives no serving count; three as a light lunch, or six as a first course or breakfast dish, is a fair guess.
Meatless cookery books of this kind multiplied in the United States around the First World War, when Food Administration campaigns urged households to observe meatless days and to stretch scarce fats and proteins. Dishes "on toast" were a familiar feature of such collections: a slice of bread turned a vegetable into a course, and the toast could be revived with hot milk rather than butter. Baked tomatoes in particular were a summer standby, since the fruit was cheap and abundant in season and its acidity and savour gave a plain meal something of the satisfaction of meat. The parsley sprig is a garnish often associated with the era, appearing at the end of recipes as a matter of course.