Home › Vegetables › Baked Corn and Tomatoes
Baked Corn and Tomatoes
2 cups cooked corn (fresh or canned) 2 cups tomatoes (fresh or canned) 1 teaspoon salt Pepper 1 teaspoon sugar 1 cup fresh bread-crums 3 tablespoons butter or savory fat Mix seasonings with the corn and tomatoes and pour all into a greased baking-dish. Spread the crums over the top, dot them with the butter, and bake in a moderate oven for one-half hour. This is a satisfactory way of utilizing left-over corn or tomatoes.
A plain scalloped vegetable dish of the sort that filled out a 1920s dinner plate. Two points decide whether it comes out of the oven as a gratin or as soup.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in books of this period corresponds to roughly 350-375F; 350F is a safe choice. Thirty minutes at that heat is enough to set the mixture and colour the crumbs, since everything going in is already cooked.
- Drain the tomatoesModern canned tomatoes carry a great deal of juice; drain them well and break them up by hand, or the crumb topping will sink into liquid.
- CornTwo cups is roughly the yield of four ears, or one and a half standard 15-oz cans drained. Fresh kernels cut raw from the cob work if you cook them a few minutes first, as the recipe assumes cooked corn.
- Bread-crumbs"Fresh bread-crums" are soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs. Soft crumbs absorb butter and brown unevenly in a good way; dry crumbs will need less butter and less time.
- Savory fatThe alternative to butter means saved bacon or roast drippings. Bacon fat is the closest modern equivalent and suits the tomato well.
- The sugarOne teaspoon is there to correct the acidity of the tomatoes, not to sweeten the dish. With sweet corn and ripe summer tomatoes you can leave it out.
- YieldAbout four side servings; the four cups of vegetables plus topping need a dish of at least a quart and a half. A shallow dish gives more browned crumb per portion than a deep one.
- BrowningIf the top has not coloured by the end of the half hour, a minute or two under the broiler finishes it without overcooking the vegetables.
Baked corn and tomatoes belongs to the large American family of scalloped vegetable dishes bound with a buttered crumb crust, a form that became common as home ovens with more controllable heat spread in the later nineteenth century. The pairing of corn and tomatoes cooked together with seasoning appears in Southern and Midwestern cooking wherever both crops ripened at once. The closing line about "utilizing left-over corn or tomatoes" is the real point of the entry: recipes of this kind were a standard answer to the problem of yesterday's cooked vegetables in the days before mechanical home refrigeration.