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Tomato Custards
4 cups tomatoes 1 sliced onion 1 bayleaf 1 sprig parsley 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 3 eggs Boil all ingredients together except eggs for 20 minutes. Put through coarse sieve. Add water to make 2 cups puree. Add beaten eggs, pour into greased custard cups standing in shallow pan of water. Bake till firm, about 20 minutes in moderate oven (375 degrees). Turn out and serve with cream sauce, to which peas or cheese or anchovy paste has been added. Serves 6.
A savoury baked custard from the era when tomato appeared at Thanksgiving as a first course rather than a relish. The recipe is sound; a few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- The hinge: bake gently, only until just setEgg custard turns granular and weeps if it goes much past 175F internally. Start checking at 20 minutes: the centre should wobble as one mass and a knife slid in an inch from the edge should come out clean. The water bath is not optional, and the water should be hot when the cups go in.
- Oven temperatureThe original already gives 375F, which is at the upper edge of what a custard tolerates. 350F with a few extra minutes gives a smoother set, especially in ceramic ramekins.
- The tomatoes"4 cups tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their juice, or ripe field tomatoes chopped with skins and seeds, since either would go through the sieve. A 28 oz can plus a little more comes to about 4 cups. Modern hothouse tomatoes are wetter and blander; canned plum tomatoes are the closer match.
- Puree consistencyAdding water to make 2 cups matters more than it looks: the recipe balances that volume against 3 eggs, which gives a deliberately soft set. If your boiled tomatoes reduce past 2 cups, top up as instructed; if they exceed it, reduce further rather than thinning the mixture.
- SievingA coarse sieve, pressed with a ladle, removes skin, seeds and the onion, bay and parsley. Do not use a blender in place of it, since the pulverised skins give a grainy custard. Cool the puree to warm before beating in the eggs or they will scramble.
- Custard cupsThe mixture comes to about 2 1/2 cups, so roughly 3 oz per cup for six servings; use small custard cups that will fill well rather than large ramekins. Grease them well and, if you mean to unmould, run a thin knife round the rim and let them stand five minutes before turning out.
- The cream sauceAn unspecified plain white sauce of the period: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or thin cream, seasoned. Anchovy paste needs only half a teaspoon, and any cheese should be stirred in off the heat.
Savoury vegetable custards appear in American cooking-school teaching from the late nineteenth century onward, offered as a genteel way to serve a vegetable in individual portions, and recipes of the type persist in household cookery books of the 1920s and 1930s. The three garnishes offered here -- peas, cheese and anchovy paste -- were all ordinary store-cupboard items of the period.