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Baked Corn and Tomatoes
Fill a baking dish with alternate layers of canned corn, tomatoes, and toasted or fried bread crumbs, adding plenty of salt and pepper, a suspicion of sugar and generous piece of butter. Have the top layer of crumbs. Bake for one hour.
A scalloped corn and tomato bake of the plainest kind, written for a fireless cooker but perfectly at home in an oven. The instructions assume you know how to season and how hot to bake, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate 350F for the stated hour works; the dish is already-cooked food being heated through and browned.
- Fireless cookeryA fireless cooker was an insulated box in which preheated stone or metal discs held food at temperature for hours. A recipe of this kind will also work in a slow cooker on high, or covered in a 300F oven, though you will get no browned crumb top that way.
- Drain the tomatoesDrain canned tomatoes well, or the crumb layers dissolve and the dish turns to soup.
- "A suspicion of sugar"A pinch, no more, per layer, to correct the acidity of the tomatoes. Roughly half a teaspoon for a two-quart dish.
- The crumbsToasted or fried crumbs, not fresh ones. Dry them in a pan with butter first; untoasted crumbs go pasty between the wet layers instead of holding their structure.
- ButterThe 'generous piece' sits with the per-layer seasoning, so it is best read as dotting each layer as you build it rather than one lump on top. Figure 3 to 4 tablespoons total for a standard baking dish.
- YieldA two-quart dish built with a 15 oz can of corn and a 28 oz can of tomatoes serves six as a side.
- FinishingIf the top has not coloured after an hour, five minutes under the broiler will set it. Let it stand ten minutes before serving so the layers hold when spooned.
Fireless cookery was a serious enthusiasm in American households from roughly the 1900s through the 1920s: an insulated chest, a pair of soapstone or iron discs heated on the range, and a meal that finished itself while the cook was elsewhere. It promised fuel economy and freedom from a hot summer kitchen. The recipe itself belongs to the enormous family of American scalloped vegetable dishes, where alternating layers of something wet and something starchy are bound with butter and baked; corn and tomatoes is a familiar pairing, and the fact that both arrive here from cans is the point rather than a compromise. Commercial canning had made sweet corn and tomatoes year-round staples by the time this book was compiled, and a great many recipes of the era were written specifically around what the pantry shelf could supply.