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Stewed Tomatoes
1 can stewed tomatoes. 1/2 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons vinegar. 1 tablespoon butter.
If fresh tomatoes, peel, cut into pieces, add sugar, a little salt, and the vinegar. Cook until tender and thick. Add butter and serve with dinner.
A sweet-sour tomato side of the sort that once stood in for a relish as much as a vegetable. The recipe is written twice over — once for canned, once for fresh — and neither version gives quantities you can rely on without translation.
- What a can meantThe standard vegetable can of the period was a No. 2, holding about 2 1/2 cups, roughly a modern 20 oz can; the common 14.5 oz can today is smaller. For the fresh version, use about 1 1/2 lb of ripe tomatoes to match.
- The sugar is the thing to adjustHalf a cup of sugar to a single can is candy-sweet by current taste. Start with 2 tablespoons, taste after the tomatoes have cooked down, and add more only if the acid is harsh.
- VinegarThe recipe specifies only 'vinegar.' Cider vinegar was common in American kitchens of the period and suits the dish better than distilled white. Note that the original adds the vinegar at the start with the sugar and salt; adding it near the end instead will keep it sharper.
- Peeling fresh tomatoesScore an X in the base, drop into boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Skins left in stewed tomatoes curl into tough scrolls.
- "Cook until tender and thick"Uncovered, over medium heat, this is 20 to 30 minutes for fresh tomatoes and about 15 for canned. The finish should mound softly on a spoon rather than run.
- Butter lastStir the tablespoon of butter in off the heat so it emulsifies into the tomatoes instead of separating into a slick.
- YieldServes three to four as a side. It reheats well and is better the second day, once the sugar and vinegar have settled.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia readership just after the First World War, when she had been closely associated with the food-conservation campaigns of the period. The recipe opens with a can and treats fresh tomatoes as the alternative. Stewed tomatoes themselves are older than the can, and nineteenth-century American versions commonly added sugar, butter and sometimes stale bread or crackers to thicken; Wilson drops the bread and leans on reduction and vinegar instead, giving a sharper, more relish-like dish meant to cut through a heavy dinner plate rather than pad it out.