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Tomatoes, Stewed (INGREDIENTS for dish) (II)
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-8 tomatoes, about 1/2 pint of good gravy, thickening of butter and flour, cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Take out the stalks of the tomatoes; put them into a wide stewpan, pour over them the above proportion of good brown gravy and stew gently until they are tender, occasionally carefully turning them, that they may be equally done.
Thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour worked together on a plate; let it just boil up after the thickening is added, and serve. If it be at hand, these should be served on a silver or plated dish.
TIME.-20 to 25 minutes very gentle stewing.
SEASONABLE in August, September and October; but may be had, forced, much earlier.
A side dish built entirely on the quality of the gravy, since the tomatoes contribute little but their own juice. Two things decide the result: firm fruit, and heat low enough that the tomatoes hold their shape.
- The half pint of gravyAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. "Good brown gravy" here means a proper meat stock reduced and seasoned, not a pan gravy from a roast; a well-flavoured beef or veal stock will do the same work.
- Choose firm tomatoesThe tomatoes stew whole, with no instruction to peel them, so they need to be firm and evenly sized, with the skins unbroken. Very ripe modern fruit is liable to burst and collapse into the gravy, turning the dish into a sauce.
- Time is a maximum, not a targetTwenty to twenty-five minutes suits firm, dense fruit. Start checking early and stop when a skewer meets no resistance at the centre; "very gentle" means the barest tremble at the surface, not a rolling simmer.
- Thickening of butter and flourThis is beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and plain flour mashed to a paste, roughly 15 g of each for this quantity of gravy. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then bring the liquid back up briefly so the raw flour cooks out.
- A wide stewpanThe point of the width is a single layer, so the tomatoes sit in gravy rather than on each other. A wide sauté pan or shallow braiser is the modern equivalent; turning them once or twice with a spoon, not tongs, keeps the skins intact.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a background heat, not a feature -- a pinch. Season the gravy before the tomatoes go in, since it will reduce very little in gentle stewing.
- Yield and servingFour to five as a vegetable alongside roast or grilled meat. The silver dish is a Victorian nicety; any warmed shallow serving dish keeps the thickened gravy from setting.
- Cost and seasonOne shilling and sixpence was a notable sum for a vegetable side dish, though the half pint of good gravy accounts for a fair part of it. The August-to-October window is when field tomatoes are worth cooking this way; "forced" means brought on ahead of the natural season under glass or in hotbeds.
Stewed tomatoes appear in Mrs Beeton's pages at a moment when the fruit was moving from suspicion to staple in British kitchens. Tomatoes had been grown in England since the sixteenth century but are often said to have been treated as ornamental or medicinal, and only through the nineteenth century did they become a common table vegetable -- the recipe still refers to a "forced" crop. The treatment here is thoroughly English rather than Mediterranean: rather than cooking the tomatoes down into a sauce, it poaches them whole in brown meat gravy and thickens the result with flour and butter, exactly as one might serve stewed cucumbers or celery. The cost note, one shilling and sixpence, was part of Beeton's signature apparatus for the middle-class housekeeper managing a budget, and it marks this as a dish for a good dinner rather than an everyday one.