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Tomatoes and Mushrooms
6 tomatoes. 1 can mushrooms. 1 cup tomato sauce. 1 onion. 1 cup bread crumbs. One can mushrooms sauted in butter. Wash and peel six tomatoes; slice and put layer in baking dish, with alternate layer of mushrooms. When dish is filled cover with tomato sauce highly seasoned with onion. Cover top with buttered bread crumbs and bake brown.
A plain tomato-and-mushroom gratin from a period when canned mushrooms were the ordinary kind. The recipe assumes a good deal of knowledge it does not spell out, chiefly about oven heat and about the water tomatoes give up.
- The hinge: drain the tomatoesSliced raw tomatoes release a great deal of liquid as they bake, and with a cup of sauce on top the dish can turn to soup under a crust. Salt the slices, let them stand fifteen minutes in a colander, and pat dry before layering.
- Oven heatWilson gives none. Bake at 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, until bubbling, then finish under the broiler if the crumbs have not browned. "Bake brown" in her vocabulary means colour on the crumbs, not merely heated through.
- The canned mushroomsPeriod can sizes varied and she does not say which; a modern 4- to 8-ounce can, drained, is a reasonable stand-in. Drain them well, dry them, and brown them in butter as she directs; the sauteing is what keeps them from tasting tinned. Half a pound of fresh mushrooms, sliced and cooked until their water has gone, is better.
- The ingredient list repeats itself"1 can mushrooms" appears twice, once in the list and again as "One can mushrooms sauted in butter." It is one can, sauteed, not two.
- Tomato sauce and onionThis is plain cooked tomato sauce, not a long-simmered Italian ragu. 'Highly seasoned with onion' most likely means the onion is cooked into the sauce, finely chopped and softened first; raw onion stirred in at the end will still be crunchy after baking.
- Buttered crumbsToss roughly a cup of dry crumbs with 2 to 3 tablespoons of melted butter until each is coated. Fresh soft crumbs absorb the tomato liquid and go pasty.
- PeelingScore the base of each tomato, drop them in boiling water for 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water, and the skins slip off. She takes this for granted.
- YieldSix tomatoes in a two-quart dish serves four to six as a side, two or three as a supper dish with bread.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper audience during and just after the First World War, when the federal food conservation campaigns were pushing meatless meals and vegetable main dishes into ordinary American households. This recipe carries the marks of that moment: a substantial baked vegetable dish, built on a canned good, cheap enough to stand in for meat and grand enough to be served as a course. Canned mushrooms were widely available to home cooks then, since commercial fresh mushroom growing in the United States was still a small industry, centred on Chester County (Kennett Square), not far from Wilson's own Philadelphia. The buttered-crumb top is a common American gratin finish of the period, often applied to baked vegetables in books of this generation, and the instruction to "bake brown" rather than to bake for a stated time reflects kitchens where ovens had no thermostat and cooks judged by eye.