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Tomatoes with Green Peppers and Cheese
Use a small can of tomatoes, chop the solid portions and mix with juice. Season tomato with salt, paprika and sugar to taste and place layer in bottom of greased baking dish. Dot with bits of butter and sprinkle lightly with minced green pepper, grated bread crumbs and grated cheese. Continue with alternate layers of ingredients until all are used and have cheese and crumbs on top. Bake in moderate oven for 1/2 hour. A bit of grated onion may be added to tomatoes if flavor is liked.
A straightforward layered tomato gratin that needs only a few clarifications on quantities, oven heat and cheese choice.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. Half an hour is enough to heat through and brown the top; if the crumbs are pale at that point, run the dish under the broiler for a minute rather than extending the bake, which only makes the tomato watery.
- A small can of tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied, and a "small" can probably fell somewhere between about 11 oz and 1 lb; a modern 14.5 oz can is a reasonable stand-in. Whole canned tomatoes suit this recipe best since you are meant to chop the solids yourself; diced tomatoes in juice are an acceptable substitute.
- Drain judgmentCanned tomatoes today are often packed in more liquid than the recipe assumes. If the mixture looks soupy after chopping, pour off some juice, or the crumbs will never crisp and the layers will collapse into sauce.
- Grated bread crumbsThis means dry crumbs grated from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind. Coarse crumbs from day-old bread, or panko, give a better top.
- Grated cheeseAn unspecified grated cheese in an American book of this era most likely means a Cheddar-type "American" cheese. About 4 oz total, divided among the layers and the top, works well with one 14.5 oz can of tomatoes.
- Green pepperMince it fine and use it sparingly as directed; raw pepper in coarse pieces stays crunchy and assertive after only thirty minutes in the oven.
- Dish and yieldA 1-quart baking dish gives you three or four thin layers, which is the point of the method. Serves four as a side dish.
- SeasoningThe sugar is there to offset the acidity of canned tomatoes, not to sweeten. Start with a scant teaspoon, taste, and stop when the sharp edge is gone.
Layered tomato-and-crumb bakes were a fixture of American cookery once canned tomatoes became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, and they earned a place on winter menus precisely because they were made from pantry stock when fresh tomatoes were out of reach. The green pepper and paprika suggest a twentieth-century version: paprika appears with increasing frequency in American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s as a milder, prettier alternative to black or cayenne pepper, and it turns up often in books that styled themselves modern.