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Stewed Tomatoes (Pour boiling water over)
Pour boiling water over the tomatoes; remove the skins; cut into small pieces and place in a saucepan over the fire. Boil gently for twenty or thirty minutes and season, allowing for each quart of tomato one generous teaspoon each of salt and sugar and one tablespoon of butter. If in addition to this seasoning a slice of onion has been cooked with the tomatoes from the beginning, the flavor will be greatly improved. 1 pint tomatoes
A plain stovetop stew of fresh tomatoes, seasoned only at the end. The whole method turns on peeling and on cooking long enough to drive off water.
- PeelingA brief pour of boiling water only loosens the skins if the tomatoes are ripe; firm ones need 20-30 seconds fully submerged in boiling water, then a plunge into cold. Score an X at the blossom end first and the skin slips off in four pieces.
- Quantities as writtenThe seasoning is given per quart of tomato but the yield line reads 1 pint, so halve it: about half a teaspoon each of salt and sugar and half a tablespoon of butter. A pint of cut tomatoes comes from roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of whole fruit.
- The onion is not optionalThe recipe treats the slice of onion as an improvement, but it is what keeps the dish from tasting flatly acidic. Add it at the start and either fish it out before serving or chop it fine and leave it in.
- Twenty to thirty minutesThat is a real reduction, not a warm-through. Boil gently uncovered so water evaporates; covered, you get thin tomato soup.
- Season at the endThe recipe has the salt and sugar go in after the tomatoes have boiled down. Since the volume shrinks by an unpredictable amount, taste and adjust once the tomatoes have thickened.
- SugarA teaspoon per quart is a corrective for underripe or sharply acidic fruit, not a sweetener. With good late-summer tomatoes you may want none.
- YieldA pint of prepared tomatoes cooks down to enough for two, perhaps three, as a side dish.
Stewed tomatoes were one of the standard American vegetable dishes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the tomato was a staple of the summer table and the canning shelf. The parenthetical title here marks this version out by its method of peeling. The seasoning trio of salt, sugar and butter is characteristic of the period's treatment of tomatoes.