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Stewed Tomatoes (Boil tablespoon butter level)
Boil 1 tablespoon butter 1 level tablespoon flour 1 quart tomatoes 1 1 tablespoon sugar Salt and pepper Rub the butter, melted, into the flour; add the tomatoes and seasoning and put in the covered kettle in the cooker for twentyfive minutes. Use one radiator.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought up to heat, then sealed in an insulated box with a preheated soapstone or iron disc and left to finish on stored heat. The ingredient list is short, but the method assumes equipment almost nobody has now.
- What a "radiator" isThe radiator is the soapstone or cast-iron disc that came with a fireless cooker, heated on the range until very hot and set under the kettle to supply the heat inside the insulated box. "Use one radiator" calls for a single disc; cookers were commonly supplied with more than one, and heavier or longer-cooking dishes generally called for two.
- Preheating is the hingeNothing in a fireless cooker cooks unless it goes in already boiling. Bring the tomato mixture to a full boil on the stove, cover tightly, and transfer it to the preheated cooker immediately; a lukewarm start simply produces warm tomatoes.
- Doing it on the stove insteadWithout a cooker, simmer the covered pan gently for 20 to 25 minutes, stirring once or twice. The result is the same: tomatoes broken down and lightly thickened by the roux.
- The tomatoesA quart most likely means canned or home-put-up tomatoes with their liquid, roughly two 14- to 15-oz cans, though fresh tomatoes were also measured by the quart. Fresh work if peeled and chopped, but they release more water and need longer uncovered reduction.
- Butter and flourOne tablespoon of each is a very thin roux for a quart of liquid, and it is meant only to bind the juice, not to make a sauce. Cook it a minute before the tomatoes go in so the flour loses its raw taste.
- SugarThe tablespoon of sugar offsets the acidity of the tomatoes; sugar in stewed tomatoes was a common habit of the period. Start with a teaspoon and taste.
- YieldAbout four side-dish servings. Traditionally served with a spoonful of buttered crumbs or over toast.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households from about 1900 through the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period carried whole sections of it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range was expensive and unbearable to keep going in summer, so a cook brought a dish to the boil, dropped it into a sawdust- or asbestos-lined box with a heated stone, and left it to finish while the fire went out. Commercial cookers were sold by mail order and by department stores, and homemade versions packed with hay or excelsior were a standard domestic-science project. Stewed tomatoes were a natural candidate: acidic, and needing only enough sustained heat to soften and thicken. The technique never disappeared so much as it was absorbed, first by the vacuum flask and later by the slow cooker.