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Tomato and Potato Pie
1 teacup of tomato puree 1 pound sliced tomatoes 1/4 pound onions 1 ounce butter Pepper and salt Short paste 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Slice the onions, and put them in cold water with the potatoes, let them boil up quickly, and boil for one minute, then drain, and put them in a pie dish. Now mix in the chopped parsley, tomato puree, butter, and pepper and salt to taste. Cover with a crust, and bake in a moderate oven one and one-half hours.
A plain vegetable pie built on the sweetness of onion and tomato, with one obvious gap in the ingredient list that needs filling before you start.
- The missing potatoesThe title and method both call for potatoes, but no quantity is given in the list. Around 1 pound of waxy potatoes, peeled and sliced about a quarter inch thick, balances the pound of tomatoes and fills a standard pie dish.
- A teacupIn British cookery of this period a teacup is not a standardised measure; it is usually reckoned at somewhere between 5 and 6 fluid ounces, so roughly three-quarters of a US cup. A full cup of puree will make the filling loose under a lid of pastry.
- Tomato pureeThis means a thin sieved tomato pulp, closer to modern passata than to the concentrated paste sold in tubes. If using tube paste, thin about 2 tablespoons with water to reach 3/4 cup.
- Moderate oven350F. At an hour and a half the pastry will colour long before the potatoes are done, so lay a sheet of foil loosely over the crust once it has browned.
- Short pasteShortcrust: roughly 8 ounces flour to 4 ounces fat, bound with a little cold water. Enough for a single lid on a 9-inch dish.
- The one-minute boilOnions and potatoes go into cold water together, are brought to a boil and drained almost at once. This is a blanch, not a cooking stage; it takes the raw bite off the onion and starts the potato so that both finish inside the pastry.
- Drain the tomatoesSliced tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid over ninety minutes. Salt the slices, let them stand ten minutes and pat dry, or the base of the filling will be watery and the underside of the crust slack.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green vegetable, six as a side. Let it settle ten minutes before cutting.
Books of this kind proliferated in the early twentieth century, driven by two quite different currents: the vegetarian and food-reform movements, which argued for meatless eating on moral and health grounds, and wartime rationing. If a tomato and potato pie was filed under "Meat Substitutes", the category was understood not as a protein analogue but simply as the substantial hot dish that occupies the centre of the plate where a joint or a chop would otherwise sit. Pastry did much of that work, since a crust made a bowl of vegetables read as a proper dinner. The tomato had become an everyday English ingredient only comparatively recently, and tinned puree is what allowed a pie like this to be made outside the short summer glut.