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Baked Tomatoes, No.3
4 large tomatoes. 1/2 cup brown sugar. 2 tablespoons butter. 1 tablespoon water.
Scald tomatoes and peel. Put in baking pan, add sugar, butter and water and bake until done.
Three lines of instruction and no oven temperature, no time, and no clue about yield — typical of Mrs. Wilson's shorthand. Here is what the original assumes you already know.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, works in a modern kitchen; expect somewhere in the range of 25 to 40 minutes depending on size. "Until done" presumably means slumped and tender with the sugar and butter reduced to a syrup, not collapsed into water.
- Scalding to peelCut a shallow X in the blossom end, hold the tomatoes in boiling water 20 to 30 seconds until the skin splits, then drop them into cold water. The skins slip off in sheets. Any longer and the outer flesh cooks and tears.
- The sugar is not a misprintHalf a cup of brown sugar to four tomatoes is a sweet dish, closer to a baked fruit than a savoury vegetable. If you want it as a side dish rather than a near-dessert, a third of that amount still glazes them.
- Choose meaty fruitPlum or paste tomatoes, or firm garden beefsteaks, hold their shape; a watery tomato will flood the pan and dilute the syrup.
- Watch the pan, not the clockBrown sugar and butter in a dry oven will scorch at the edges once the water cooks off. Baste once or twice with the pan syrup, and add another spoonful of water if the bottom starts to darken.
- VesselUse a shallow dish just large enough to hold the tomatoes upright and touching. A wide pan spreads the small amount of liquid too thin to become a glaze.
- YieldFour tomatoes serve four as a side dish. Season with a little salt before baking despite the omission; without it the sweetness has nothing to push against.
Mrs. Wilson gives three numbered versions of baked tomatoes, and this is the sweet one — sugar, butter, and almost nothing else, a treatment that sits in the long American tradition of serving tomatoes as fruit. Through the nineteenth century tomatoes turned up in preserves, sweet pies, and "tomato figs" as often as in sauces. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and compiled this book around 1920, when wartime food-conservation habits were still fresh; her recipes are deliberately terse, assuming a reader who owned a range and needed only the proportions. No temperature is given at all — the reader is left to judge the oven for herself.