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Summer Casserole
6 hard-cooked eggs 3 ripe tomatoes 3 tablespoons butter or other fat 3 tablespoons flour 2 teaspoons salt 1 1/2 cups milk 1/2 cup grated cheese Buttered crumbs Cut hard-cooked eggs in half and arrange around the edge of a greased casserole or baking-dish. Slice peeled ripe tomatoes in the center of the dish. Make a white sauce of the milk, fat and flour. Add cheese, and stir over a very low fire until the cheese is well mixed and smooth. Pour over tomatoes and eggs. Cover with crumbs and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven (350 degrees-400 degrees F.). The centers of the tomatoes may be scooped out, and a whole egg placed in each, if desired.
A straightforward baked egg-and-tomato gratin from the era when a "casserole" was becoming an American oven dish rather than a French stewpan. Nothing here is dated except the sauce proportions and the salt.
- OvenThe stated range of 350-400F is real; use 375F and give it the full twenty minutes, or until the crumbs are browned and the sauce bubbles at the edge.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of sauce is heavy by current taste, especially with grated cheese added. Start with one teaspoon and correct the sauce before it goes into the dish.
- The sauce is the hingeThree tablespoons each of fat and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk gives a medium sauce, thick enough to coat the tomatoes rather than run off them. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk, and keep the heat as low as the recipe directs when stirring in the cheese so it melts without going grainy.
- Tomato waterSliced ripe tomatoes shed a lot of liquid in the oven and can thin the sauce to soup. Salt the slices, let them drain ten minutes on a towel, and pat dry before assembling.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe specifies only "grated cheese." A firm dry cheese is implied by the grating; any sharp aged Cheddar works, and about 2 oz makes a half cup grated.
- Buttered crumbsToss about 3/4 cup dry breadcrumbs with 2 tablespoons melted butter. Fresh crumbs will steam rather than crisp.
- The variationIf you scoop the tomatoes and set a whole egg in each -- the ingredient list suggests hard-cooked -- allow a little longer for the dish to heat through than the stated twenty minutes.
- YieldNo yield is given; six eggs and three tomatoes will stretch to about four as a light main course with bread, or six as a side. A shallow dish keeps the crumb layer broad and thin.
This belongs to an American moment -- plausibly the interwar decades -- when the one-dish oven supper began to acquire its own chapter in general cookbooks. The word casserole had shifted meaning on its way across the Atlantic, from the vessel itself to the food baked in it, and books of this period sometimes hedge by writing "casserole or baking-dish." The dish is also a summer recipe in the literal sense the title claims: it depends on ripe tomatoes, which before widespread year-round shipping meant late summer, and it leans on eggs, milk and cheese rather than a roast, keeping the oven work brief in hot weather. White sauce enriched with grated cheese was a common binder of the era, the same foundation used for creamed vegetables, scalloped fish and macaroni.