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Scalloped Tomatoes
1 pint peeled and cut tomatoes 1 pint bread crumbs Pepper 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon salt Reserve three tablespoons of the bread crumbs, and spread the remainder on a pan. Brown in the oven, being careful not to burn them. Mix the tomatoes, browned bread crumbs, salt, pepper, sugar, and half the butter together, and put in a shallow baking dish. Spread the unbrowned crumbs on top, and dot with the remainder of the butter cut into bits. Bake in a moderately hot oven for half an hour. The top of the dish should be brown and crisp.
A straightforward baked side that depends almost entirely on the texture of the crumbs. The one thing to get right is the toasting step: crumbs stirred into the tomatoes raw turn to paste.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in a book of this vintage means about 375-400F. Half an hour at 375F gives you a set, bubbling dish with a browned top.
- Measuring by the pintA pint is 2 cups. So roughly 2 cups of peeled, chopped tomatoes with their juice and 2 cups of soft bread crumbs, which is a few slices' worth of stale white bread.
- Crumbs, not pankoThe recipe says only "bread crumbs"; soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old loaf bread suit it best. Dry commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and can leave the dish stodgy; if that is all you have, use less.
- Toasting the crumbsSpread them in a single layer and toast at the same oven heat for 5-8 minutes, stirring once. They should be tan and dry through, which is what keeps them from dissolving into the tomato.
- TomatoesCanned whole tomatoes, drained of the thinnest juice and chopped, work as well as fresh. If using fresh, peel by scoring and blanching for 30 seconds.
- The sugarA tablespoon reads as a lot now, but it is balancing the acidity of the tomatoes rather than sweetening the dish. With ripe summer tomatoes or a sweet canned brand, start with a teaspoon and taste.
- Dish and yieldA shallow dish matters — something around 8 inches square, so the mixture sits an inch or so deep and the crumb top makes up a real proportion of each serving. Serves four as a side.
Scalloped dishes — food layered with crumbs and butter and baked until the top crisps — were a staple of American home cooking through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and tomatoes were among the most common fillings once canned tomatoes became cheap and reliable. The tablespoon of sugar with tomatoes is advice often found in period cookbooks, when commercially canned tomatoes ran sharper than most brands do today.