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Boiled Tomatoes
Wash the tomatoes and pour boiling water over them, allowing them to remain in it about one half minute or less if they are very to remain in it about one half minute or less if they are very ripe. Cover with cold water and peel. Cut into pieces and add salt, pepper to taste, butter and a small amount of sugar. for five minutes; place in cooker and allow to remain one hour.
A fireless-cooker recipe, which means the tomatoes are brought to a boil on the stove and then finish in a heavily insulated box on retained heat alone. The text as printed has a line of type duplicated and a verb dropped: the sentence beginning "for five minutes" should read "Boil for five minutes."
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, usually packed with felt, asbestos or hay, sometimes with soapstone discs heated on the range. Food went in boiling hot and coasted down over an hour or more. A modern equivalent is a heavy pot brought to a full boil, lidded, and left wrapped in towels in a cooler, or simply a slow cooker on low.
- The hinge: it must be boiling when it goes inRetained-heat cookery has no heat source. Anything short of a hard rolling boil at the moment the pot is sealed will drift down through the temperature range where bacteria multiply. Get the tomatoes fully boiling for the stated five minutes, then insulate immediately.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water followed by cold water is still the standard method. Score the skin at the blossom end first and it will slip more reliably; underripe tomatoes may need a full minute.
- The sugarA pinch, not a spoonful. It is there to offset the acidity of the fruit, which varies with variety and ripeness. Taste after cooking and adjust rather than sweetening up front.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given. Reckon on 2 lb of tomatoes, about a tablespoon of butter and a teaspoon or less of sugar, serving four as a vegetable side.
- On the stove insteadWithout a cooker, the same dish is 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, uncovered for the last part so the liquid reduces. The hour in the cooker is about convenience and fuel economy, not about the tomatoes needing that long.
- Acidity works in your favorTomatoes are acidic enough that this fireless dish is far safer than milk, egg and meat preparations done the same way. Treat cereals, custards and joints of meat in a retained-heat box with much more suspicion.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households from roughly 1905 through the First World War, promoted as a fuel saver and a way to free the cook from tending a coal range on a hot day. Cookbooks of the period sometimes carried a section of recipes rewritten for the insulated cooker, and the same principle appears in the hay box and in the wartime thermos cooker. The technique lost ground once gas and electric ranges made a low, steady, unattended flame easy, and it survives today mostly in the slow cooker and in the insulated food jar. That this recipe simply boils and holds peeled tomatoes suggests the method was applied broadly, whether the dish needed an hour or not.