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Stewed Tomatoes
When fresh tomatoes are used, peel and cut into small pieces, put in a saucepan, and boil gently twenty minutes or half an hour. Add a few bread or cracker crumbs and a slice of onion and season with butter, salt and pepper five minutes before the cooking is finished. Allow for a quart of tomatoes one teaspoon each of salt and sugar and one tablespoon or more of butter.
A plain stovetop stew that depends almost entirely on the quality of the tomatoes and on cooking them long enough to concentrate. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- PeelingScore the blossom end, drop into boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Skins left on curl into leathery shreds in the finished stew, which is why the instruction leads with peeling.
- A quart of tomatoesRoughly 2 lb of fresh tomatoes once peeled and chopped, or about two 14-15 oz cans with their juice. The recipe as written addresses fresh tomatoes; canned ones are already cooked and will need less time.
- Boil gentlyThis means a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil. A hard boil risks scorching the sugars at the base of the pan before the tomatoes have thickened.
- The crumbsThey are the thickener, not a garnish. Start with 2-3 tablespoons of dry bread or cracker crumbs per quart and add more only if the stew still runs; they swell for several minutes after going in.
- The slice of onionAdded five minutes from the end, a single thick slice is there to perfume rather than to cook through. If you want cooked onion in the dish, chop it and add it at the start.
- SugarOne teaspoon per quart is a corrective for acidity, not a sweetener. Ripe summer tomatoes may need none; canned ones usually benefit.
- YieldAbout four side-dish servings.
Stewed tomatoes are a long-established American way with the fruit, appearing in nineteenth-century household books, and the bread-and-butter version here is close to a scalloped tomato cooked in a pan rather than baked. The pairing of tomato with sugar and a little onion is common for the period, as is the use of stale bread or broken crackers as a thickener, a habit of thrift.