Home › Vegetables › Tomatoes (Tablespoon sugar teaspoons)
Tomatoes (Tablespoon sugar teaspoons)
1 tablespoon sugar 2 teaspoons salt 1 saltspoon pepper 1 pint bread crumbs 2 tablespoons butter Butter a baking dish and in it put alternate layers of tomatoes and bread crumbs, seasoning each layer of crumbs and covering it with small pieces of butter. Have a layer of crumbs on the top. If fresh tomatoes are used bake one hour, if canned, a half hour. If the crumbs begin to brown too quickly cover the dish with a tin plate. 6 large tomatoes
This is scalloped tomatoes, written in the loose-leaf shorthand of its day: the ingredient list runs first, the tomatoes are stranded at the end, and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook's judgment.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, which was normal when ranges had no dials. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the hour given for fresh tomatoes; the recipe itself offers no guidance beyond the timing and the warning about the crumbs browning.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. With two full teaspoons of salt already in the seasoning mix, taste before you add all of it, particularly if the breadcrumbs are from commercial bread.
- A pint of bread crumbsMeasured by volume, not weight: two cups of soft crumbs, roughly 3 to 4 oz. These are torn or grated from stale bread, coarse and irregular, not the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters, which pack denser and turn pasty here.
- Preparing the tomatoesThe recipe says nothing about how to cut them; slice them thickly. Peeling is optional; the skins curl and toughen slightly but do no harm. Very juicy tomatoes will flood the dish, so drain the slices briefly if they are dripping.
- The butter mattersTwo tablespoons dotted across several layers is thin coverage by modern standards. Dot it generously on the crumb layers, especially the top, or the crumbs stay dry and mealy rather than crisping.
- The tin plateA tin plate laid over the dish was the period's foil. Use foil, loosely tented, the moment the top crust colors, and pull it off for the last ten minutes to re-crisp.
- Canned tomatoesThe half-hour for canned reflects that they are already cooked through. Drain them well; canned tomatoes carry far more liquid than the recipe's structure can absorb.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size or number served; six large tomatoes layered with a pint of crumbs will serve about six as a side.
Scalloped tomatoes belong to a large family of American baked dishes built on the same principle: alternate layers of a wet ingredient and buttered crumbs, bake until the crumbs set into a crust. The technique was a common way to stretch and dignify a glut of summer produce, and it appears in many American household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under names like scalloped, escalloped, or simply baked tomatoes. The instruction to use canned tomatoes as an equal option is worth noting: commercially canned tomatoes were by then widely available and inexpensive, which is why a vegetable chapter could treat them as an ordinary substitution rather than a compromise.